Educaly
UX research and design to create an app to seamlessly book private lessons in a few clicks.
The problem
Hypothesis
Objectives
Users need to book private lessons, but sometimes is difficult to arrange the time and location with the tutor, which ends up with no lessons or takes long time.
To empathize with users to design a mobile app that allows users to easily book private lessons by showing the available lessons of the week for each tutor and clicking for one of them, avoiding delay and waitings.
I hypothesize that by gathering data on users' emotions and behaviors and empatizing with them, we can gain valuable insights to create a design that addresses the problems found.
Methods
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Emphatizing users and opinions about current products: 1-on-1 interviews
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Create empathy: user persona
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Understand specific needs: user journey map
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Designing a prototype that solves the issues found: wireframing and prototyping
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Testing the prototype: usability studies
Empathizing and defining
User interviews
I conducted interviews to users ranging from 18 to 60 years old to gather information about the main pain points while booking private lessons using websites.
The results showed that most users prefer to book in a seamless way rather than have to entable conversations to achive a consensus between the tutor and the student regarding the time and place of the lessons.
Availability
Not being able to easily select one available lesson for the tutor you want. The view of a calendar with the available lessons displayed would be a good option.
Tedious scheduling process
Having to interact multiple times to schedule a lesson is a long and tedious process in which most users abandon. Being able to click each available lesson and select onsite or online options would be a good solution.
User persona
Personas help foster empathy by allowing us to better understand and represent the diverse needs and behaviors of real users. They ensure that the product design is user-centered, addressing various motivations, pain points, and goals.
During the research phase for Educaly, I developed a persona named Zareen—a busy mother seeking an efficient way to find the best English tutor for her daughter. Zareen's limited time and desire for simplicity were central to shaping the user experience, ensuring the solution was quick, intuitive, and aligned with her goal of providing quality education for her child.
User journey map
To further understand user needs, I combined storytelling with visualization by creating a user journey map for the persona Zareen. The goal was to explore her experience of scheduling a private English lesson for her daughter.
Through Zareen’s journey, I uncovered the challenges and frustrations she faced along the way, highlighting pain points that informed key improvements in the design.
Zareen faced significant challenges when choosing a tutor, since she felt she lost a lot of time starting conversations with potential tutors.
Ideating and prototyping
Wireframing
Paper wireframes: When designing the homepage of the app, I focused on creating an easy and accessible interface to access to a wide variety of private tutors, and at least, their names. I liked the big pictures of tutors and the top carrousel showing top tutors of different disciplines and fields.
Digital wireframes: The objective was to create a clean and attractive homepage in which users could immediately start looking for tutors.
A carrousel of top rated tutors is shown at the top.
The names and types of lessons of the tutors are displayed below their pictures.
Tutors are already shown in the homepage.
Usability studies: I conducted one unmonitored usability study using the low-fidelity prototype to assess whether users have difficulties on scheduling a lesson with a tutor.
The main insights that I found were:
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Users doubted on what would be the best option to find a tutor: whether clicking "top tutors" or a tutors from the "Tutors near you" section.
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No possibility to book recurring sessions.
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There is the need to have pre-made options of the most searched lessons at the homepage, such as: english, japanese, piano, etc.
After the usability study
The initial homepage design had two big sections to find tutors. Now, there is a big section displaying tutors near the area of users. Now the design also includes most frequent tutor types at the top of the page in case the user already knows what they are looking for.
Before the usability study
After the usability study
Now the tutor profile page shows an option to book recurring lessons since this is one of the most frequent cases. Now the recommendations of that tutor are shown below the options of the lessons by scrolling.
Main mockups
Testing
Prompts to test the hi-fi prototype
1
Choose "Daniel" as the tutor you want to book a lesson with.
2
Select an available session from the calendar.
3
Check the details of the lesson and confirm the booking.
4
Return to the homepage.
Try the hi-fi prototype here