ClassEquity | classroom economy platform
IronHack | Case Study
The final project. The last two weeks of the Bootcamp. A call to reality.
This was a real-life test before joining the market. We had stakeholders with a product and needs. My group and I had the chance to work with an American company called Class Equity.
My teammates were Georgina Gomez Omati and Bruno León. We had worked together before during the third week of the Bootcamp and understood that we complement ourselves in teamwork so decided to give it another try. I can say that it was the best idea we had. It was an amazing experience and I have lots to thank them.
The platform subject was inspiring and made us go as deep as we could manage during these two weeks to design a solution with a good fit for the users and also the company.
When we believe in what we are working on, we put our heart into it and design with passion. Because of that, we got an accomplishment we were not expecting: our project was among the classes' two finalists.
Once we knew the company we were going to work with, we had to understand who they were, how their product worked, and all the concepts behind it.
First, let's understand what ClassEquity is?
Class Equity is a platform launched in August of 2021 driven by Katie and Abby, two entrepreneurs from the United States whose mission is to increase economic mobility by empowering students to become financially responsible.
This platform allows teachers to apply classroom economy digitally, incorporating financial literacy into everyday routines.
Because of their teaching background, Katie and Abby know that teachers are in charge of many things and have a full schedule of activities and to-dos. So, ClassEquity comes to help with the student management and save their time :)
Even though it was launched as an MVP, it already has more than 4000 users.
Ok, but what does Classroom Economy mean?
Consists of five main components:
- Classroom jobs;
- Bills;
- Bonuses;
- Fines;
- Classroom Store;
Give teachers a chance to manage student behavior with positive reinforcement, model the importance of saving and spending, teach the standards for personal financial literacy, and reward students. It also provides students with tools to succeed in the real world.
Let's dive into the process
After playing around with the platform, and understanding the concept, we talked with the stakeholders. They were fantastic, helped us understand better their needs, put all their research at our disposal, and most importantly, they put us in contact with some teachers that had been using the platform since the launch.
The brief was to improve teachers' and students' experience by making it easier and more professional.
By going through the research they had and experiencing the platform, we started making some assumptions that by rethinking and reorganizing the information architecture we would improve the user experience.
This was the key moment when I realized that I was underestimating the scope and complexity of the project.
We validated the pain points by interviewing some of the teachers, and the main ones were used to scope our project down making it possible to fit into the two weeks we had.
To do that, the first thing we decided was that we were going to work only with the teachers' portal and not with the students' because we had access to them to go deeper into the problem and also to test any solution we designed.
We got to a point where we had so much data that made it challenging to scope down and work on a problem statement. Brainstorms, affinity maps, mind maps, and going back and forth on the research, were a huge part of our process. But one thing was getting clear every time:
To improve anything in the platform we first needed to reorganize the information so we could design a new sitemap.
The four main pain points were:
- The job tasks are not possible to be monitored digitally, only by paper, giving teachers a hard time keeping track of their student's accomplishments;
- The to-do list is currently placed on the dashboard which can make things overwhelming;
- Only one teacher can have access to each class;
- The information architecture and the UI are not intuitive and sometimes are even repetitive.
Searching through the market we got the knowledge that there are just a few platforms focused only on financial literacy, but there are others that are very well established in the schools that were helpful to inspire some specific features, the site map redesign and also the visual aspect.
Meet Emily :)
Defining the problem
Based on our research and the time we had, we focus our problem statement and hypothesis statement on making teachers’ experiences better.
Solution
Currently, the dashboard is the page you land once you log in as a teacher. There is no home page with an overview.
So our first decision was to rethink and reorganize the information architecture by simplifying the navigation bar and creating a home page.
Our second decision was to have easy access to the tasks and the overview of what the students are doing by designing a side column on the home page.
On the My Classes page, we improved the overview of the students, created the feature of adding a co-teacher, and put the setup of the jobs, rent, and everything related to the class inside the classroom.
Today, the setup (settings) is not related to a specific class so once you edit something is going to apply automatically to every class you have.
In our solution, teachers can customize one class, but also apply the same setup to others if they feel like it.
We validated with the Low-fi the main changes with the stakeholders so that we could design a Mid-fi and test it.
The tests were run with users that already use and know the platform, but also, with potential users (people that had never seen the current platform before).
We validated lots of our design decisions and also got good insights on how to improve the usability and the user flow.
Let's get visual
The interviews got us some feedback about the visual design of the platform. There were some comments about not being friendly. Adding to that, we analyze the competitors' visual design and worked on a new design for ClassEquity.
So, before jumping to the Hi-fi, we designed a mood board that helped us understand what the platform should transmit, then we worked on a new visual identity and some UI elements.
Pages and features in detail
Prototype
Next Steps
In this last version of the prototype, we could test only with one teacher. I would like to test with more users to validate the design.
Adding to that, there are still some features to be designed in the teachers' portal like the jobs page, history page, and each of the setups.
In parallel would be amazing to start working in the students' portal. Is supposed to be applied to K12. This means that there have to be different kinds of defaults because the information can be different and also some visual aspects depending on the age range.
