[Case] Report Card — Somos Educação

Somos Educação is the main group of basic education in Brazil.

Schools, educational systems, publishers and educational solutions for Elementary, Technical and Higher Education impact the day to day and transform the lives of thousands of educators and millions of students across the country.

The brands that make up the SOMOS Educação group are quality references and empower the group’s ability to form a better prepared society.

Report card, simple math?

All of us, good students or not, always waited for our report cards at the end of each period, hoping to see our results.

In the schools of Somos Educação is no different. Report cards are a crucial part of the entire school system, but because of so many schools with different forms of calculations, this was starting to become a problem.

Love the problem, not the solution

The Somos Educação owns several school “brands”:

• Anglo;
• Sigma;
• Maxi;
• Motivo;
• Red Baloon;
• Among others;

and although they use the same teaching methodology, they use different forms of assessment and, finally, calculations to make the report card.

This is a way to maintain the integrity of each school’s assessment.

This was becoming a problem for the backoffice team, as there were many variables encompassing the simple result of report card.

Getting started

To better understand this whole scenario, we immerse ourselves in the day-to-day of the backoffice team, passing through observations and interviews.

We began to understand how the calculations were done, what were the main problems, and some hypotheses were emerging.

At one point we needed to understand the analyst's journey that would “make” the report card, and we found a way out, using a tool called Map & Target, extracted from Jake Knapp’s book, which helps us map the person’s journey into focus. Find out the crucial point to attack.

The result of this tool showed us that despite the different ways of calculating, there was a way to unify the process and treat differences within an intelligent platform.

Personas

On top of this flow, we extracted the actors who would be involved for the cycle to be completed, and we got to three people:

1º — Maurício Alencar (School Ops);

2º — Joaquim Fernandes (Teacher);

3º — Amanda Perez (School Cordinator);

Each persona has been explored and defined according to their profile, behavior, needs and job to be done. Each persona has a flow and important part in the whole process.

Maurício Alencar — Job to be done

Through a web interface, Mauricio could create a new evaluative structure, define the school and year he would like to act, structure the periods and define the details of the evaluation. This configuration would be saved and made available for schools to do their calculations and then make the report cards available to their students.

School Operation's area — UI

Joaquim Fernandes — Job to be done

The teacher has the role of feeding the database with the student's grades, according to their assessments at the end of each period. These notes will be saved and available for the platform to perform calculations and make available to parents and coordinators.

Teacher's area — UI

Amanda Peres — Job to be done

Coordination has the role, of course, of coordinating the school, and there are also cases where it can request specific student calculations and follow up the bulletins that are already available.

There is a platform for the coordinator as well, so they can request the calculation of a newsletter, know which notes are already available to perform the calculation and manage to maintain the quality of delivery.

Cordinator's area — UI

Evaluation+ Report Card (Avalia+ Boletim)

Combining these main flows, was born the Evaluation+ Report Card.
That is to be a central of the evaluation forms of each school. This maintains Somos’s differential and also gives analysts, teachers and coordinators security to do a good job of processing the newsletters.

Concluding

The “deliverable” of this product is the report card, which is born in our platform and is available in the portal of parents and guardians.
Our product assures its quality, in correct calculations, reducing rework of the School Operations team, reducing delays of the schools in the delivery of the report card to the responsible ones of the students and generating more confidence, maintaining the quality of the product Somos Educação.
It has been tested, presented and approved by the main stakeholders and is being developed by Ornito, a company that I am currently part of.
Once again we have learned that focusing on the user and their needs is essential, and I am grateful to have been a part of it.

For more visual design details, check-out my dribbble. Thank you!

Tools

• Shadowing;
• Interviews;
• Map & Target;
• Points of pain;
• Prototyping;
• Personas;
• Usability Test / Hypothesis Validation;