Study Buddy

OVERVIEW

Role: Sole Product Designer

Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator

Duration: Ongoing

Devices: Mobile App

SUMMARY

• Study Buddy is a reliable way to hire qualified tutors that are already affiliated with your child’s school.

• In an experimental study conducted in 2004, tutored middle schoolers were found to have higher GPA’s and more self-confidence in their academics than the control group of students who did not receive tutoring.

Business Goals

• The primary goal of Study Buddy is to help parents find tutors.

• In order to facilitate that goal, Study Buddy wanted to offer both virtual and in-person sessions for convenience and to accommodate comfort levels during the pandemic.

• Another important goal was to offer affordable options. 

• After all, access to extra help for children should be something that’s accessible to all.

Persona

Defining the Problem

Parents need a safe and reliable way to hire quality tutors for their children that are within their child’s school district.

Proposed Solution

How Might We…

• provide parents filtering options so they can select a tutor that’s affiliated with their child’s school district.

• create a tool that lets parents receive tutor referrals from other parents.

User Flow

• I started with onboarding since most of the parents I interviewed had never used a tutoring app before.

• Select school comes before filtering further because parents didn’t want the app tracking their location and they wanted to elect to tell the app which school their child attends.

• Parents can then filter for tutors based of preferences like subject, grade level, 1:1 vs. group and more.

• The tutors whose profiles match the parents preferences all pop up.

• Then, the parent can click into these profiles to see more details about the tutor and ultimately decide if they want to book a session.

DESIGN

Sketches: Discarded Ideas

• For the homepage, I discarded sign-in with phone bc parents thought it was too many steps.

Sketches: Accepted Ideas

• Filter by subject was prioritized since several parents I interviewed mentioned it was the second thing they’d want to filter for after their child’s school.

Accessibility

• So, I darkened the main color and increased it’s contrast between other colors in the design system so the app would be visible to a wider variety of parents.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

• Initially, I had the app set up to guess the child’s school based on the location of the phone as you can see in the 2nd screen.

• However, this feature was removed because parents found it creepy that the app might already know where their child attends school.

Low-Fidelity Test Results & Iteration

• Results:

  • 1. How does the app already know where my child goes to school?

  • 2. I’d like to specify what grade my child is in.

• Here you can see how I implemented the selection of state, zip code and grade level items.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

• These changes were all implemented to create the mid-fi wireframes.

• I also decided to add an accreditation filter since a lot of parents expressed an interest in having their child’s tutors accredited in initial interviews.

Mid-Fidelity Test Results & Iteration

• Results:

  • 1. Would prefer if all tutors had accreditation/background check.

  • 2. Ability to book a session with tutor.

  • 3. Unnecessary “select tutor” button.

• Remove the extraneous “select tutor” button.

• I saw a pattern of parents wanting all tutors to be accredited and have had their backgrounds checked so I removed the option to filter for this item and put them already on the tutor profiles.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

• But parents wanted even more info when it came to selecting a tutor. 

• So, I added clickable sections where you could read reviews about Norissa the tutor.

• In order to facilitate recommendations, I added a share button on the tutor profile.

• That way, parents can share the profile of a tutor they like with other parents who might not have the app and would not need to download it to read about Norissa.

Prototype