Happy Hearts — UX Case Study

The name of the game for project one was rapid prototyping, meaning we needed to identify a problem and solution, then develop a clickable prototype.

Students who are taught social emotional learning in schools are better equipped to manage their emotions and attitudes which are shown to improve quality of life. The client, Effective to Great, is looking to bridge the gap that students face when they are taught social emotional learning (SEL) in school but not at home. So how can we bridge this gap? Educate parents. Give power to parents by putting the right tools in their hands so that they will be confident in their abilities to nurture young minds into great people.

Prompt

Identify ways that we can bridge the gap between the progress being made with student learning and their parents.

Deliverables

Paper prototype and clickable prototype

Research

In order to understand who I was designing for, I interviewed 10 users as well as conducted secondary research to understand more about social emotional learning and the roles parents play in their child’s social emotional learning success.

Several user quotes that represented the majority of user feedback.

To synthesize my findings, I created an empathy map that led me to understand that despite users saying they knew what SEL is, they didn’t actually know enough to reinforce SEL techniques at home. So having resources available to them would benefit both themselves and their children in the long run.

Empathy Map

Based on my user research, I was able to identify the following problems and solution:

Problem: Parents don’t know how to reinforce SEL techniques because they don’t know what SEL is and they’re too busy to do research.

Solution: Develop a tool that parents can use to reinforce SEL techniques at home and ultimately bridge the disconnect between what students learn at school and how parents can reinforce the material at home.

User Flows, Wireframes and Paper Prototypes — Oh my!

Once I synthesized my research, I found that creating a user flow was useful because it helped me visualize what was needed to make a successful app.

The user flow broke down the three main features: Learn, Practice and Fun. When the user selected which feature they wanted to access, they were able to determine the complexity of the content offered by indicating whether it was the parent, child or both accessing the app. The content would be tailored to the identified user.

The above is the inital user flow and does not accurately map out the final prototype as I iterated it several times based on user feedback.

Keeping the core features in mind, I designed several wireframes to jumpstart the visualization of the app and then went straight into developing a paper prototype.

I found that creating the paper prototype was the most useful part of the design process because the valuable feedback helped me:

• Find the most valuable feature of my app and focus on those
• Add a navigation bar
• Streamline the amount of interfaces for the final app

Clickable Prototyping — Balsamiq

Next Steps

Two features I would like to expand upon are:

• Adding incentives — I would like to expand the profile page by adding a bot that users can take care of whether it’s a dog, cat or plant. They would be able to feed the bot of their choice with the coins they acquire every time they practice flashcards, play a game or attend an event.
• Adding a “Meet Up” section in the Events feature — This would encourage users to foster positive relationships with like minded parents and their children which could ultimately benefit the child learning SEL techniques.

Please feel free to leave any comments/feedback. Thanks for taking the time out to read my first case study!