School Sphere
I worked as a UX lead for a concept project in a group of four designers. The mission was to keep parents informed about the wellness of their students and school life.
UI.UX LEAD
Christian Spaulding
Role:
Product and Branding
Duration:
5 weeks
The vision, challenge, and the solution.
There are so many aspects of a student's school life it can be hard to keep up and stay organized with the basic overview of a student. To confirm this, we had a parent on the design team with five children.
Although her school had a student management app, she and many other parents had several complaints. The app looked outdated, the UX was confusing and not user-friendly, etc.
How we solved this? We researched the market, talked to parents, and redefined a new school management app with all the features a parent would need to stay updated with their student's school life and communicate with school staff without it being overbearing.
Building my team and product vision was the first move to creating this product. Each week we came together I would create a meeting agenda to make sure we were on track to complete the project.
Laughs, bouncing ideas, and communication were how we bonded as a team. Creating a comfortable environment for us to be ourselves around each other was important to contributing feedback.
We defined the problem by doing extensive user and market research and finding common problems products had.
Mapping out success.
We took a strategic approach to creating the sitemap. We didn't want to make it so big that users would become overwhelmed, but we also didn't want to make it so small users would feel like they were missing something.
We summed it down to complete essentials. We eliminated 5 different pages that were deemed to be useless to be alone and we could merge to create an even better page
Branding that excites.
Our mission with School Spheres branding was to make it welcoming and exciting to parents and teachers. The process of creation was putting together a mood board and visualizing branding based on creations we liked.
Designing consistently.
Creating a design system helped us stay consistent when we were designing. Testing the design system in prototypes was how we were able to build confidence in its ability.
Process to success.
Bouncing ideas off the team helped with my contributions to the project. My leadership and project management skills helped us stay organized and motivated throughout the project.
What I learned.
Delegate to the best: You don't need to do it all yourself. Delegating tasks to someone with expertise will help your project thrive.
Diversity within the team: With different ranges of ages on the team we had a parent who had a lot of inside knowledge about parent's needs and had parent-teacher connections too.
