Optimizing Parent Tracking of School Work
Exploring features to add to the Google Classroom app to ease content load on parents and students.
Details
Role
UX Designer
Duration
80 hours
User
Parents (and students) who use Google Classroom
Platform
iOS and PC
Skills
User Research, Persona, Flows, Visual Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Client
Academic Project
Tools
Figma, Otter.ai, Whimsical
Understanding How We Got Here
When March 2020 hit, normal routine instantly changed. Suddenly, the kitchen became the school classroom, the living room became the gym, and children were running both parents' virtual and mental backgrounds. The balance of staying on track with children’s school work isn’t an easy one for parents, so I wondered how might we be able to ease some of this stress on parents?
Breaking Down Parents' Experiences with Online School Platforms
To understand parents' experience with this challenge both during the pandemic and currently, I interviewed 5 parents whose children were in elementary school during the pandemic. I focussed on this group since children at this age still need guidance in school. I wanted to learn about how parents manage time and their experiences using Google Classroom.
Conclusions from Interviews:
As we can see, parents already receive reminders regularly in order to remember tasks that they need to complete, especially in digital format. If a similar feature is added to Google Classroom, we are not challenging parents to create a change in behavior. Instead, such additions would incorporate parents’ current habits to ease the amount of information they need to remember on their own.
Affinity Map Key Points:
I also noticed in the interviews that parents mentioned how most children are now used to navigating Google Classroom on their own, so I wanted to keep this as an important factor when testing prototypes.
Identifying the 'Who' and the 'How' Behind the New Features
Having my data from interviews and competitor research, I wanted to address users’ noticed patterns, experiences, and behaviors. I created my user persona: Tanya Shah. She's a busy parent juggling between her work and caring for her family.
User Persona:
I created a product requirements document to further demonstrate the development of the new feature. This document outlines how the reminder feature will merge with the app as a whole. It also helped me start planning the steps users, like Tanya, will take when interacting with the feature on Google Classroom.
Product Requirements:
To put these goals to tangible ideas, I needed to start mapping out the app’s design.
Designing the Locations of the Features
I created a user flow to show exactly how and when a user can make a decision to set a reminder. Creating the flow helped me map out my screens and how I will test them. I wanted to ensure that users had more than one option for where they can set a reminder. One option is when the user is on an assignment’s screen and another is when they see their list of assignment. This way it’s readily available and the user doesn’t need to be on any specific page to locate the feature.
User Flow:
I needed to think about the visual look of the screens. In order to uphold Google Classroom's visual guidelines when designing, this UI Kit was put together from Material Design and other Google resources. It includes fonts, colors, and card spacing since those are the elements my designs incorporate. This step allowed me to stay within Material Design’s style when creating wireframes.
UI Kit Sections:
Below are both low and high fidelity wireframes I was able to make using this UI kit. I aimed to keep accurate space between cards and stroke number in order to stay consistent with Material Design.
Key Low and High Fidelity Wireframes:
I tried out a few types of styles before committing to one. In this example below, the first wireframe required the user to find the feature under the settings button. Using an icon is more clear and visibly indicates whether a reminder was added to that assessment or not, but I wanted to test out my design to see if it made sense to users.
(Modified) High-Fidelity Wireframe:
Low-Fidelity Wireframe:
User Testing
Since parents mentioned in the interviews that their children are now completing school work on their own through Google Classroom, I wanted to consider testing how students would also interact with the feature. I created a prototype and conducted 2 rounds of testing on 17 people total.
Round 1: I created a flow testing the usability of the feature. I tested this prototype on 8 parents and students, allowing me to learn if reminders would be intuitive for both types of users.
Round 1 Conclusions:
A couple confusions that came up included the phrasing of asking when a user wants to set the reminder for. Keeping these results in mind, I made some changes to address the challenges users faced and conducted a second round of testing.
Round 2: The changes made included adding walkthrough messages to help a user learn the feature for the first time and changing the wording for the reminder to be more straightforward from “1 week before” to “1 week earlier.”
I completed 9 tests over Maze. All the user testers completed the tasks, but I did come out with some more UI changes to consider.
Round 2 Screens:
Since both features were quickly understood by parents and students, the implementation of the reminder feature was successful. In order to further test if the features effectively encourage parents and students to remember assessments and locate resources over time, perhaps data collection, a diary study, or other long-term research technique would be beneficial.
Conclusions
Initially, I assumed my target user group would be parents, but I very quickly learned that even young students are the primary users of Google Classroom now. I then had to slightly shift my outlook on my research and testing to incorporate both groups. However, this proved to be beneficial since when testing parents, I learned that some parents believe the feature could enhance the independence and responsibility of their children. Through the addition of reminders, parents do not need to monitor their children’s school as much since it encourages students to keep track of their own work.
Project Outcomes
In addition to keeping parents organized, features can encourage a development in independence and responsibility in the student
The feature was quickly understood upon implementation
Parents appreciated that the reminders were integrated in an app that schools were already using
Next Steps
Consider a long-term research technique or data collection to assess if the features effectively encourage parents and students to remember their assessments
Complete UI edits
Learning Outcomes
Be cautious when using new tools, especially for testing
Sometimes your user(s) may be different than you first expect
