LearningWrite

Meal planning for backpacking can be an overwhelming experience. Spork in the Road is a website idea that is designed to help backpackers easily find recipes, meal plan confidently and connect with the community.

Methods

User Research, User Experience

Client

Twenty Ideas

Duration

4 months

Tools

Figma, Figjam

Product

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LearningWrite helps students practice writing in Spanish through fun and interesting prompts.

The product has been in use since 2015 and had not received any updates. There have been some teachers who have stopped using it, and Twenty Ideas wants to update their product to gain new school districts interest.

Re-evaluating the product. How can we increase value and gain new school districts.

When I joined this product, the focus for design was to understand the product, and what features could we change or add that added the most value to the user. I began by reviewing all the research documents, reports for the pilot program and set up some interviews with current users to understand their pain points.

To find out what current user pain points are, then prioritize the most important changes and additions that will give the most value to existing and new users.

Interviewed teachers who currently use the product and ones who stopped using the product. We wanted to understand what is the secret sauce as well as what is missing.

Since the product was already used, we could interview some users who have been using the software for a few years. I was also able to review the intial round of discovery research that was documented from the pilot program.

‍We discovered that teachers use the product in a different way than originally designed.

This key takeaway shaped a future vision of the product. The product may be less about test scores and instead focus that students learn more through fun and easy assignments.

There were universal problems and successes which led to us confidently making decisions.

Working with the product manager, we wrote down the top three issues to tackle and brainstormed possible solutions. With limited budget, we analyzed which feature was worth the effort.

We could only implement a few design changes, so we based our decision upon the user interviews. We wanted to focus on what made the teachers job easier, and how to increase student engagement.

Conclusion: Delivered 5 solutions to focus on, gained retention of schools and onboarded an additional school district.

I could not change the UI or overall design, so I had to incorporate the design changes into the existing UI. With each new feature I designed the flow mockups and annotated document for the developer that they could use after the handoff meeting.

Once I finished designing the new features. I was on standby as the developer implemented the new features. It was a short project, but I am happy with the impact I had on the project through the discovery research. The product continues to be worked on today.How important it is to bring development on early. I wish I had brought them on sooner because they were able to point out what wouldn't work and explain functionality of the product. Once we started working together more, I was able to quickly design a great solution.