Mobile app to empower English education
How might we help immigrant English language learners efficiently manage and schedule their lessons through a centralized platform?
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Scope
Tools
Team
Timeline
(4 months)
Project overview
Background
Opportunity
Goal
Potencia is a Boston based non-profit learning organization. Potencia offers low-cost tutoring sessions to immigrants in the Greater Boston area. Tutors are primarily local college students and tutoring sessions are held on various college campuses.
The existing manual process for matching and scheduling at Potencia is cumbersome and often results in dissatisfaction due to frequent cancellations. There is a clear demand from both tutors and learners for a more efficient system to enhance connectivity.
Create a solution for unorganized tutor-learner communication and help establish a sense of community at Potencia through designing a mobile app MVP.
Objectives
- Understand learners’ and tutors’ daily workflows
- Determine features to help alleviate pain points for learners and tutors
- Propose app requirements for development
- Evaluate the app for usability issues
- Recommend features for future product development
Format
- Phase 1: Generative research via stakeholder interviews, competitive analyses, and learner and tutor interviews
- Phase 2: Evaluative research via usability testing on prototypes and high-fidelity wireframes with learners and tutors
Key Findings & Insights
Generative Research
Potencia’s manual matching and scheduling process is inefficient and frustrating for users and administrators, especially given frequent cancellations and last-minute changes.
Manual coordination creates a bottleneck in the user experience and contributes to user fatigue and administrative burden. The app should introduce an automated matching system that pairs learners and tutors and implement smart rescheduling schools to reduce friction after cancellations.
Tutors and learners expressed a strong need for easier, more streamlined ways to communicate and stay connected outside of scheduled lessons.
The app must provide learners and tutors a way to chat with each other without relying on external tools, by providing in-house translation tools.
Evaluative Research
Time-saving functionality ranked higher than aesthetic or novel features in user feedback.
Users are looking for tools that reduce friction, not just add functionality. Streamlining workflows and accessible design should be a top design priority and content should be scannable at a glance.
Every user emphasized how important translation features were and how much they appreciated having them.
Translation features allow both learners and tutors to fully participate in the language learning experience outside of classes. Increasing ease of communication also increases social belonging and connection for users.
Snapshot of usability testing as the design evolved from mid- to high-fidelity
❗️ The text is hard to read, availability is not clear from first glance.
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💡 Tutor availability is shown in both a text and visual format.
Conclusion
Our team developed a high-fidelity MVP for Potencia's mobile app over the course of four months. These designs will be implemented by Potencia's development team and we anticipate they will enhance the user experience for tutors and learners throughout Boston.
Future direction
Implement video calling and community threads to increase the social learning aspect and cultivate a sense of belonging for users on Potencia.
Limitations
- This research was conducted with zero budget.
- Recruitment panel for learners was representative of the learner population within Potencia, which was primarily made up of male Brazilian immigrants.