CLIENT
DESIGNATION
DURATION
4 weeks
DELIVERABLES
Competitive analysis
High-fidelity mockups
Logo
Prototype
Style tiles
BRIEF
Strive's goal is to bridge the lack of communication parents and teachers have with one another. Messaging is the main feature provided for easy communication.
Strive is an app designed for parents and teachers to be able to communicate with one another without an obstacle course to go through. For the teacher, Strive is an application that allows them to access information about their students and hold conversations with parents and other teachers all within the same screen. For the parents, the mobile app allows them to view their child’s grades, comments from teachers, and the ability to message the teachers and other parents.
When I first looked at the wireframes, one thing that did not set an impression was the name they had given this app, Briteline. The name of the app would be the first thing our users would come across and I felt that the name didn’t seem impactful. The reason I went with the name Strive is because the name itself has a goal in mind. Strive is reaching for something. Strive is looking for a goal. For parents and teachers, they are striving to lessen that communication gap that is causing a disconnect between them.
After deciding on the name change, my teammates and I went over all the content the UX team had provided us. Below are a few of the many wireframes screens that the UX team had provided us for the web and mobile applications.
Looking at the desktop homepage for teachers, you can see the thick bar on the right side. That bar is a clear indicator to users that the feature is used for messaging with parents and other educators.
The screens here show the communication features meant for parents. You can see from the tab bar that users would have easy access to sending and viewing messages within the app.
Overall, the wireframes that the UX team provided was built very well. Other than the name, the main focus of the app itself, communication, was delivered. After reviewing the wireframes, we then decided to begin understanding who our user personas were. The two user personas we learned about were Sung-min and Henry.
Traditional Educator
Frustrated by excessive digital integration
Prefers minimal frivolous communication
Busy father of a 5th & 7th grader
Not as involved in his kids’ education due to language barriers and long hours at work
Wants more interactions with his kids’ teachers, even when he can’t attend school events
Reading up on who our personas were, we realized that one big factor we needed to keep in mind was that we needed to design an app that was simple. When it came to Sung-min, he needed an app that had simple language due to his language barrier. A simple design was also needed for when he is busy and on the go. Because Henry prefers communication to be straight to the point, we needed to design an app that prevented communication to be constantly repeated from messages being lost or accidently being unread.
After getting to know Sung-min and Henry, we put together our competitive analysis research on active education apps and other apps that they might use on a daily basis.
The issue we realized about the competitors was that there weren’t any apps that focused on communication between teachers and parents. One of the competitors we studied was Google Classroom. Their app is basically a portal for the classroom where students and parents can view announcements, homework assignments, and anything else the teacher decides to link. The problem with Google Classroom is that the parents have a passive role and have no ability to communicate with the teacher.
Also, the majority of the competitors focused on younger children, so the apps were bright, colorful, and cartoony. ClassDojo was a good example portraying the cartoony look. Just by looking at this app, a user is able to tell right off the bat what age range this app is designed for. Because students will not be the main users for the app we are designing, the most appropriate approach is something simple and less childish.
After building out our competitive analysis research, we came up with three design principles. The reason for design principles was to give me and my UI team a base for what we were designing. We wanted to make sure to design for our users and come back to our principles if we were to veer away from it.
Now that we had our principles to follow when it came to designing the wireframes, it started becoming more clear on how to approach my design. The direction I wanted to follow was something bright for positivity and practicing commonly used UI elements to make it simple and fast to use for the busy individuals.
Before I started designing wireframes that the UX team provided, I needed to grab some inspiration.
The main elements I wanted Strive to represent consisted of friendliness, trust, and enjoyment. For teachers and parents, communicating with one another might be an intimidating thing to do. With that thought in mind, I put together different images to best represent the concept of friendliness, trust, and enjoyment.
After creating these two mood boards, I designed two style tiles to show a better representation of how the design will look.
The style tile that I choose to pursue was the first one. The reason for this was to make sure that Strive still represented an education app while showing its friendly and fun side with the use of the colors. The CTA was represented by the bright purple to ensure clear hierarchy for the users.
I sketched a couple of logo concepts after creating my style tile.
The logo I decided to follow through with is the one that looks like a group of people holding hands or sitting on a round table together. The idea for this logo was to show a sense of community.
For my initial logo design, I put a gradient on the logo itself to give an illusion of it popping out. I chose to use a shade of teal to represent the trustworthiness of the app. The typeface used is called Yuanti. I chose this type because it was thin and simple. The san serif also made the name look more friendly.
After doing some user testing, I realized that there was too much empty space in the center of the logo and that the name, Strive, was too close to the logo itself. The gradient had a hard time standing out when it stood in front of a different color other than white and it came to my attention that the name was too thin and users would have a hard time reading it once it’s smaller.
For my iterations, I got rid of the gradient and went with a solid shade of teal or purple, changed the typeface to San Francisco Bold, and made the white space in the middle of the logo smaller. As a result, the concept of what I was going for still showed in the iterated version of the logo. The pieces felt more balanced out and it worked well with the new typeface. The boldness of the font made it more visible and users would have had less struggle reading it.
One goal of Strive was to build a easier way for parents and teachers to communicate with one another. The UX team did a great job in designing the wireframe for the parents and the teachers. What I focused on was to make sure the user flow was simple to go through by carefully placing the colors in the right place to draw the user's’ eyes.
For mobile, the “Feedback” tab was one of the important tabs within the app. When the parent wants to contact a particular teacher, they have the option of calling them or to message. I chose to place the bright purple on the “teachers” tab to draw the parents’ eyes to the button to indicate that is where they would find the ability to contact them.
For the desktop “Homepage”, I chose to use the purple on the messaging aspect of the app. The reason for this was to give attention to the teachers that messaging parents or other educators is always available to them no matter what screen they decided to be on within Strive. Although the UX team did a great job on creating the wireframes, one major aspect I decided to change, after consulting with the UX team, was to switch the calendar and the school announcements. Interviews with educators showed that they were excited for the calendar and hoped there would be more interactions with it other than viewing the current date. So, for my design, I enlarged the calendar and gave teachers the options of plugging in important reminders for them to have.
View the desktop prototype
View the mobile prototype
I believe that Strive still has room for growth. A few features that I believe would improve Strive would be including some passive communications between parents and teachers along with the direct communication that the app includes. For example, a teacher’s ability to update their status on what the student is doing or if the child misbehaved so parents can have updates on how their child is doing in school. Another passive communication that could be incorporated is the ability to have parents rate how the child is feeling that day before heading off to school for teachers to be aware of how their students are that day. A child could be stressed about an incident and might not be able to focus in class, and if the teacher was aware of it early in the day, they could find ways to help the student out.
After completing the Strive project, I can say that I am definitely more fluent in Sketch, InVision, and Illustrator. Learning multiple programs all at once was overwhelming, but the reward at the end was definitely worth the hardship during the project. It also gave me motivation to learn more, knowing that I am capable of pushing my limits.
There have been two things that I learned about myself through this project. The first is that I’m great at staying calm and finding a middle ground when it comes to team conflicts. Working in a group of three, I found myself being the person my teammates turned to for a reasonable solution that all three of us would be happy with. Teammate A was more of an extrovert and went with the flow of things. Teammate B was more introverted, but was strict on getting tasks done timely. The reason why they butted heads often was because of the one thing we had to work together on, the presentation deck. They both disagreed on how it should look and what content it should hold. When the two of them asked me on what I thought, I tried to find a middle ground for the two and suggested one work on the visual aspect of the deck while the other one worked on the content layout. With agreement, we decided that when the deck is all complete, all three of us could go through it and edit it together. In the end, my teammates and I were a great group because the three of us were able to balance each other out.
The second thing I realized about myself was that I do well at public speaking. As an introvert, I don’t like being the center of attention with all eyes on me. The great thing about the other designers I worked with was that they always reassured me that I’d do great. After my very first presentation at Designation, I was told that I presented very well. Well, I didn’t believe it. To me, they were just saying that for the sake of saying it because it was the first time I’ve presented anything there. After weeks and months of standing in front of people and presenting and hearing the same feedback about how I presented well, I finally started believing them and believing in myself. Yes, I still sweat and get ice cold hands, but the devil on my shoulder is getting smaller and smaller as the days go by.
