Student Success
a tutoring service for parents, students, and tutors
Challenge
Create a tutoring service that is helps students succeed in their own academic journey; relieves parents; and gives tutors the tools needed to succeed.
Outcome
A family of students, parents, and tutors that support the individual development of each student.
Research & Insights
Before making the jump from being a private tutor to a business owner, I conducted interviews with the 12 families I was currently helping. In these interviews, users (parents) shared why they sought out a tutor in the first place and what aspects of the service is important to them. It's blatantly clear that being a parent is incredibly difficult and very demanding. In addition to being parents, most users were also full-time workers. As a result, parents always had a number of things to do and be preoccupied with such as: picking up the kids from work, taking them to after-school activities, cooking, shopping, and getting some rest & relaxation.
They were: scheduling a tutoring session, communicating with their child's tutor, being informed about their child's progress during the session, and lastly, submitting payment for the sessions.
Design Principles
From our findings we created the following design considerations to guide our exploration into solutions.
Personalized Instruction: sessions should help students meet their personal goals
Flexible Schedule: parents should be able to secure tutoring that meeting their varying schedules
Trust: our service should be professional, yet caring towards students and parents
Generating Concepts
How are we different from the competition upon first glance? Brand Analysis
As you probably have noticed, there are a million and one tutoring centers. Coming into this arena, we needed to stand out from the crowd of adjectives, abstract concepts, and "(insert name) Tutoring" competitors. Being a designer first, educator second. I decided that this organization wouldn't revolve around tutoring as the majority of tutoring centers do.
Rather, we would be focused the most valuable feature that our users seek, the success of their child. More specifically, the commitment from their tutoring provider that they will do anything to ensure their students succeed.
And with just a glance, parents were able to see that we were the team for them.
Our Logo
How can we make the customer experience profession, yet inviting? User Journey Mapping
Parents already have enough on their hands. Our on-boarding needed to be easy and comfortable for parents new to purchasing tutoring and experienced parent. Designing for ease starts with mapping a typical user journey for new parents. Mapping the sequence of events along with the thoughts, emotions, and platforms associated helped identify opportunities to provide exceptional customer services. From this mapping, it became clear the most critical phases of the user journey are the consideration and evaluation phases. Here, parents are learning about the service and then evaluating their purchase decision after tutoring was provided.
To better support families during the consideration phase, our website was dedicated to communicating our value to users and guiding them to a free phone consultation. Once on the phone, parents were able to communicate their concerns and schedule their child's first session. This process rose our conversion rate to 80%. To ease parents during the evaluation phase, each session was followed by confidential notes sent to parents from their child's tutor. These notes would summarize the events of their child's session and provide parents insight into their child's academic progress and recommendation. Parents loved this service and it remains one of our most popular features.
A Quick Tour of Our Website
Session Report Email for Parents
How Can We Consistently Deliver Excellence? System Design
Delivering excellence once is easy. Consistently delivering excellence across all tutors and sessions is the real challenge. Our initial attempt to ensure consistency was to create a strong vision that tutors could rally behind. While that did attract desired talent, it could still use assurance that a systematic approach brings.
Based on our user personas, parents treated tutoring purchases as an investment and they wanted to see results, preferably sooner than later. By empathizing with parents, we realized that they would enjoy seeing the step by step progress their children are making from each session. Additionally, as an instructor, it would be helpful to have a checklist to ensure that we're maximizing the value delivered to our students.
How Can We Create a Culture of Continuous Innovation? Creative Workshops
As a team seeking to help our students succeed, we regularly met to discuss the progress of our students and brainstorm means of enhancing their education. One of our favorite activities was the "Brain-Writing" activity. In this activity, each instructor wrote the biggest hurdle their student faced on the board. Each instructor would then take two minutes to brainstorm solutions for colleagues topic. Once, the original instructor arrived at their problem, they would then prototype the solution they felt would best serve their student and then pitch to the group.
From these exercises, tutors would develop tools to best assist their students.
Brand Manifesto for Tutor Applicants
Solution Delivery
And finally.. the Student Success Solutions scheduler for parents!
This application was designed to meet the following considerations inspired by our conclusions in our learning phase from parents.
Easy to Navigate: parents should be able to intuitively know where features and information are located
Low Number of Clicks: parents should be able to access any feature within one to two steps
Friendly: the app should provide a friendly and inviting environment for busy parents
Results
Over the last two years, our team's dedication to excellence and student-focused instruction has helped over a hundred K-12 students in our local area grow and succeed in their classes. Our commitment to doing what is best for our students has enabled us to identify opportunities to enhance their learning process and make learning fun. As we continue ahead, this student-centered approach will help us to consistently raise the bar for educational services and the abilities of our students.
Learning
As my first sole business, there was much that I didn't know from a business perspective that made this experience challenging and an amazing learning experience.
From this experience, I really learned the importance of setting measurable metrics to enable tracking of progress. Prior to designing for data collecting, our parents didn't have much means of determining the effectiveness of their child's tutoring until they received exam and quiz scores. Even that was a poor determiner. There are factors unrelated to tutoring that could affect a child's ability to perform well on tests.
Once we implemented designs for data tracking, our parents reported an increased satisfaction of their children's progress. Additionally, the data enabled our team to identify unmet needs and have a solid basis to explore innovations for our students!