Context
Concept Schools is an avant-garde, bilingual school where students learn through interdisciplinary projects. To showcase their unique teaching method, the school needed a platform that would keep parents informed about projects, schedules, communication, and special dietary information for each student.
To ensure instant communication with parents, an application with essential information and notifications was designed. The interdisciplinary projects are taught differently from the conventional methods used by most schools today. Therefore, the school required an exclusive and customized model to demonstrate to parents what projects their children were involved in and what they were learning.
Spoiler… See the final version of the prototype mande with ProtoPie!
Discovery
Concept Schools needed an effective method, just like its educational experiences, to communicate reports and activities that students were performing in the school to their parents. One of the prevailing issues was that communication between the school and parents was slow and scattered, involving various different channels such as WhatsApp, email, and others.
The owner of the Concept Schools, who is also the president of the company I work for, wanted not only the new school brand to be amazing but also for the entire experience of conveying what the students were doing inside the school to be incredible for parents.
This demand was passed on to the directors of the respective areas, who, in turn, conveyed it to their development teams. Once the budget, time, and team were approved, the project would begin.
Stakeholders Map
The development team was composed of:
- A Manager;
- One User Experience Designer (myself);
- Two Front-end Developers;
- Two Back-end Developers;
As the User Experience Designer, my role in the team was to identify the pain points of stakeholders and end-users, create prototypes for presentation and testing with stakeholders and end-users, perform componentization, design the final product, and hand it over to the developers. We had daily follow-ups with the development team to make interface adjustments or business rule changes.
The process followed the following steps:
Interviews with stakeholders closely involved in school operations and parents, through online conversations and some visits to units in Ribeirão Preto and São Paulo.
After identifying the pain points, we started the project ideation, always involving available managers and stakeholders in the process. During this stage, sitemaps were presented to understand the solution.
Once the solution direction was approved, we created low-fidelity prototypes and conceptual designs, which were validated again with stakeholders. During this phase, we discussed the feasibility of the design with the development team, considering available time and technologies.
After all the above parts were approved, the design team created high-fidelity prototypes and handed them over to the development team.
The project was finalized and published.
In interviews and conversations with school directors and managers, the problem was presented as follows: The school communicated with parents through various channels. Teachers used WhatsApp for conversations, email for official or more serious communications, and Google Docs to share projects, progress, and reports for each child. There were two main issues. Firstly, these methods could vary from school to school, meaning the schools didn't have a centralized channel for communication with parents, and information was scattered across Google Drive folders. Secondly, being bilingual, all materials had to be shared in both Portuguese and English. There was no internal standardization for how this content distribution should be done, so each teacher from each unit did it in their preferred way, which hampered the visibility of the content.
Ideation
The proposed solution was to create a single platform for communication between the school and parents. The product was initially divided into two parts:
Teachers and school admin persona:
Responsive web platform for managing registration, content, and communication.
Single user registration on the platform. Parents, students, teachers, coordinators, and other collaborators had a unique registration on the platform and could be transferred between school units without losing their personal data, information, and saved history.
The Concept school employs an innovative teaching method where the common disciplines of the BNCC (Brazilian National Common Curricular Base) are used within a single project. Depending on the teacher and school, the document is assembled with different fields, without following a strict pattern. A customized planning agreed upon by the schools was used for registering students' projects, creating a standardized organization for all projects to avoid teachers rewriting the same content multiple times and to support other languages.
A calendar was implemented for schools to announce events at each unit. It also features a scheduling function, allowing parents to book the best time for conversations.
For toddlers (equivalent to kindergarten and preschool), teachers needed to send a daily report to parents detailing the children's food intake during school hours, bathroom visits, and other observations that needed to be shared.
A messaging channel was implemented to enable the school to maintain a single communication channel with parents. Initially, parents couldn't respond to the messages to avoid burdening teachers with often trivial WhatsApp inquiries. However, after the product launch, the design team proposed that an internal team be designated to communicate with parents.
Flowchart
Guardians' persona:
Mobile platform for quick monitoring of the most relevant information, with notifications and daily reports:
- The single login in the app allows parents to have visibility of all their children, even if they are in different units, avoiding the need to log in multiple times.
- The initial section displays the most recent notifications for each child. The "a la Nubank" (An innovative famous bank in Brazil that was doing a big buzz with its app) menu was a specific request from the President of the group, who believed it would bring an innovative touch to the product.
- Parents can switch the app's display language whenever they want, revealing the bilingual content registered by teachers.
- Projects are centralized in a single view, and points that teachers haven't registered on the platform will not be visible to parents, saving time and providing less overwhelming content. The calendar shows upcoming events related to each child and also allows parents to schedule personal appointments with teachers.
- A daily report is delivered to parents with relevant information about food and other necessities for young children.
- Messages section provides news and school or personal announcements.
Web Interface Design - School Backoffice
For the web, a powerful system that allows collaborators to manage their schedules, take care of students, and be in communication with parents.
Login Screen
Employee role
Projects and Competencies
Planning and developing the step-by-step education of students.
School Admin
Messaging
Schedule Planning
Daily Report
Mobile App - Prototype first concept (not final)
The mobile part of the application is designed only for parents and guardians of the students.
Login Screen
First contact with the app experience.
Home Screen
Discover the students' updates and access all available areas.
Projects
The guardian can stay informed about exactly what the students are learning.
Calendar
Schedule appointments with teachers and never miss important dates related to your child's activities.
Some feedbacks and results...
The platform was well-received by schools, and here are some feedbacks from parents and teachers:
- Parents were quickly informed about their children's news at school through notifications.
- According to school staff, the increase in parent engagement with the school was noticeable.
- The time taken for teachers to register projects reduced by an average of 40%.
- The time required for class and student progression decreased from 'weeks' to 'just a few days.'
- Teachers had more organized schedules as all appointments were made through the platform, avoiding conflicts and scheduling confusion.
The platform was also well-received by the company as it served as a foundation for other internal products. Currently, the platform has approximately 3500 registered students, 5500 parents, 400 employees, and receives regular updates.
It is also prepared to accommodate new school units that will be inaugurated over time, as well as other languages to provide a multilingual education.
Contact
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