Llama is an Early Childhood Education (Daycare and Pre-K) engagement platform that helps parents communicate with care providers/teachers to maintain a trustworthy relationship and ease parents' worries while their kids are away in school.
Project Context
BCG Confidential Client, Early Childhood Education Industry
The project is to help the ECE (Early Childhood Education) client define and validate a new product strategy to address the digital challenge they are facing, that is the applied 3rd platforms can't drive the right engagement between teachers and parents.
My Role
Mar. 2020- Jun. 2020
(3 months)
During concept shaping, I conducted ethnographic research, stakeholder interviews, as well as concept proposals. In the product building phase, I designed four rounds of prototypes for user testing and delivered the validated MVP experience as the final outcome.
Key Deliverables: User Interview Conduction, Workshop and Learning Synthesis, User Journey Mapping, Exemplar Analysis, User Stories, Wireframe, Sitemap, UI&UX design, User Testing, Prototypes, Branding Initiation
Problems
1. Our ECE client's digital experience is fragmented from using multiple 3rd party software. It doesn’t drive the right engagement from parents and teachers.
Deployed for Parent Engagement
Deployed for Live Video Streaming
AN INTERNAL TOOL
Deployed for Curriculum and Learning Tracking
“ I don't like multiple apps! ”
– Parent of 2 boys (3 and 5 years old), TX
2. The client suffers from business challenges because current digital solutions in market don't address parent-teacher communication frictions and visibility needs. The 3rd party products they are using are designed as while-label products for merely meeting the basic communication needs. Our ECE client need a product solution that's specifically tailored for their business needs and with improved UI/UX design.
• Lack of consistent communication
• Insufficient issue resolution
• Perceived lack of educational benefits
“ Out of the 12 care updates available on Brightwheel we only use 4. There’s so much on there that we don’t use, it creates confusion. ”
– Teacher
Overview of The Product Solution
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The new and improved ECE solution significantly increases the transparency between caregivers and parents by offering features for consistent care communication, optimized behavior reporting, smooth class onboarding/transition, as well as education/development support. Therefore, the product solution is defined based on four engagement lenses: care communication, behavior & incidents assist, class onboarding & transitions, and educational development.
Parent App
Care Communication and Media
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Direct messaging to specific teachers, directors and parents, as well as group chat
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Improved care updates
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Live-stream integration
Incident Resolution and Behavior Support
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Open sentiment survey for sharing feedback
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Incident support and follow-up
Onboarding and Transitions
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Welcome kits from schools with teacher and classroom profiles
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Profile pre-population
Education and Development
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Linked media to care updates, messages, and learning areas
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Bite-size summaries of child’s day/week
Teacher App
Care Communication and Media
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Message prioritization with alerts and notifications
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Smart care updates
Incident Resolution and Behavior Support
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Incident tagging and follow-up notifications
Onboarding and Transitions
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Personalized welcome kit content for new and transitioned parents
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Parent and child profiles for info bridging
Education and Development
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Easy learning and milestone share
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Creation of daily, weekly bite-size summaries
Final UI/UX Demonstration
_____
Key Parent Features
Welcome Kit
Welcome Letter
Classroom Tour
Teachers Bio
Learning Focus
Class Schedule
Parent Connection
Care Communication
Main App Page - List View of Daily Feed of Care Updates
Live Stream Integration
Receive Photo Updates With Learning Tags
Comment/like Care Updates to Interact With Teachers
Receive Bite-sized Weekly Report
Fill Survey to Share Feedback With the School
Parent App Walk-through
Key Teacher Features | Teacher Dashboard and Feature Highlights
Teacher App Walk-through
PROCESS
_____
Unpack Existing User Experience and Capture User Frictions/Needs
Ideate and Prototype Design Solutions
Design and Validate MVP Features
Interviews
We started from ethnographic user interviews to highlight extreme behaviors and unpack underlying reasons for needs. We facilitated 90-minute interviews with parents, teachers and school directors to unpack frictions across the ECE journey and digital roles.
32
interviews
16 parent interview + 8 teacher interviews + 8 director interviews
ECE Journey and Mapped Frictions
After interviewing with those three stakeholders, we had a thorough understanding of the users regarding their existing ECE experience. We synthesized and visualized the ECE knowledge into an extensive journey map and mapped out the learned user frictions and needs against the user steps to have a consolidated view of the user problems and use it as guidance to define the MVP features.
“ I was scared to death when I put my daughter in daycare.”
– Emerald, First-time parent
“ I pick up my kid and I don't know what assignments he has until I get home. That's something I wish the school would communicate with me somehow so that I could plan my evening. I’m a planner. ”
– Emily, Texas, Parent of 2 children aged 3 & 5
User Needs
The previous ethnographic interviews and the ECE interaction map guided us uncovered three distinctive pillars based around need states that lay the foundation to deliver a complete, user-centered ECE experience.
Personas
We initially identified eleven personas across our three stakeholders and then consolidated them into three persona use cases with overlapping needs and aspirations that capture key need states and opportunities.
Growth-mined Parent
Targeted content and communication ensuring optimal child development in the classroom and at home
Focused Teacher
Seamless and efficient processes in the classroom and at school allowing me to focus on each child's development needs
Everywhere Director
Easy tools to quickly prioritize emergent needs so that I can focus my time on what's most important for my school and staff
User Scenario
I created user stories to envision a day of a user's life with the ideal digital solution. It pointed the key features that need to be designed for the first round of user testing.
Site Map
Wireframe Mapped in Stores for Testing
Unmoderated and Moderated Concept Testing
We use the wireframes created prototypes with surveys and open questions on features for parents and teachers to complete testing without moderation via Validately. The unmoderated testing is for collecting feedback on envision feature set mapped to value levers across a large sample size to inform prioritization. Besides, we conducted moderated in-person interviews to develop a deeper understanding of frictions and responses provided in unmoderated testing.
230
Validately Responses
7
Zoom Follow-up Testings
Recorded Validately Testing for the Parent Flow
Recorded Validately Testing for the Teacher Flow
Testing Results
Parent Testing Results
90% parents responded this digital tool is improved compare with their existing experience with Brightwheel
86% parents responded this new digital experience would improve the current day-to-day communication with school
93% parent responded they would like to recommend this product to their school
Teacher Testing Results
85% teachers responded this digital tool is improved compare with their existing experience with Brightwheel
92% teachers responded this tool could facilitate their day-to-day in the classroom
85% teachers would like to recommend this product to their school
Iteration
Towards the Final Design
Parent App
Teacher App
Director Reports
“Brightwheel is very teacher-dependent in terms of what information gets pushed out. Because of the way this app is organized, it would provide more consistency in terms of the amount of information received.”
– Parent
“You really hit the nail on the head with the teacher dashboard. It’s much quicker than having to go from screen to screen for each individual student.”
– Teacher