BSCToday
Finding a new school shouldn’t be challenging. The Better School Choice Today (BSCToday) app is meant to simplify and organize the search for the busy parent.
Overview
The Problem
School selection can be a difficult and time-consuming task for parents. Existing products that are meant to ease this process often lack important information for parents and/or make for a chaotic experience. In other words, sometimes the search can feel like recess.
The Project
This project was in partial fulfillment of Flatiron School’s product design course. It was divided into 3 sprints, 1 week per sprint. Usability testing involved 3 participants and occurred in low-fidelity wireframing before designing for high-fidelity.
My Role
With the guidance of my instructor, I was the only product designer on this project. My main tasks were to conduct market research, ideate solutions, design prototypes, and test usability.
Sprint outline
Discovery Phase
Getting to Know the Parents
In families where two parents are present, only one parent tends to lead the new school search. Based on initial user interviews, common pain points parents faced include long hours of preliminary research, tight schedules for school tours, and doubts stemmed from the lack of information available.
Learning About the Best School Choice
I found that the current market lacked the following: transparency and simplicity. Existing products either contained paywalls that limited content on school profiles and/or they fell short in user communication when presenting school rankings.
Users of these products expressed frustration in the inaccurate information provided to them. To most, they’d rather go with their gut and tend to take first impressions seriously.
Tests, Results, Revisions
Prototyping Solutions
The main feature that I found most viable for this product was a school checklist that the user would use to organize their wants. This would immediately be followed by a school match percentage based on the number of points met by the school profile versus the checklist. To test this, users were tasked to complete onboarding and select two school profiles to save for later, based on the best matches generated.
“Before and after” wireframes of 2 screens after initial usability testing
Simplifying Long Measures
Initial usability testing among 3 participants revealed confusion about how school matching works. The low-fidelity wireframes lacked information about the logic behind the percentage system, and users preferred that all results be presented to them instead of only the best school first.
In the high-fidelity prototype, this was solved by adding sections for information purposes only, such as explaining what and why the checklist is an option immediately after onboarding. I separated the screen solely for learning about how matching would work. That way, the user would also be given more control over onboarding by skipping the checklist process and browsing at their own leisure.
High-Fidelity Prototype & Takeaways
User task flow demonstration. The user was tasked to onboard and save 2 schools based on their checklist. Colors may appear altered due to the compression of this image.
Formulating Next Steps
Words can be overwhelming. From testing, I learned that presenting users with a lot of information can create cognitive load. Applying color and visual elements meaningfully can reduce this, but must be further tested. I recommended that more screens be added to allow engagement from the user instead of relying on a matching system as the only unique feature to the product.
Future improvements include an organizer for school applications and documents, as well as an interactive visual map of schools in the area.
