To gain a wider insight into the problem space I conducted user interviews with a wide range of subjects relevant to the sector.
My subjects were:
The findings started to show it was as much about supporting parents in aiding their own children as it was the children themselves.
Shedding light onto the power of learning games and how beneficial technology is to children.
As well as solid evidence that intervention isn't taking place early enough in a child's education which ties to inequality.
I was incredibly lucky to interview a true expert in his field Marius Frank, with a long standing career in education and assistive technologies.
Marius enabled me to focus in on more of a specific issue surrounding systemic beliefs and cultural opinions on children with learning difficulties.
The most beneficial takeaway was that if we can support and change the attitudes of parents as a whole, children wont have to depend on funded support.
The key takeaways from the 5 different education tools were:
Learnings from the competitor reviews showed the most successful products were those that kept teachers, parents and children as stakeholders throughout the design process.
Therefore my personas were exactly that:
The value proposition was the last segment of phase 1 of design for good, starting to outline the pains of the target audience and produce gains (solutions) in hope of making a difference to the problem space.
Features to aiding parents in the support of their children:
“Building an app for parents with useful features around screening children for learning difficulties, helping parents with extra-curricular learning involvement and the ability to communicate individual problems surrounding SEND.”
Phase 2 was all about consolidating research into solutions, data modelling techniques were used to develop a minimum viable product to set the goal for the design phase.
Ideation models used:
Using task flow diagrams I started to model the MVP, including the onboarding process, accessibility settings and the screening chatbot and the forum feature.
Following an iterative design process, the first row is initial early stages, the middle row is my test flow that I conduct usability tests with then the third row is wireframes that are ready to move to midfidelity.
Mini can help parents in a variety of ways, using the built in prompts to simplify SEND local offers or even just to help breakdown homework tasks enabling parents to be better involved in their childs education.
