PEEKAPAK

Duration: 2.5 Weeks   Team: 4 Designers   Tools: Invision, Illustrator, Omnigraffle 

Deliverable: High fidelity interactive prototype

My Role: I was in charge of heuristic analysis, competitive analysis, conducting interviews, affinity mapping, persona development, storyboarding, sketching, and usability testing. 

THE CLIENT: Peekapak wants to be able to bring the classroom to the home by allowing parents to be more involved in their child's learning.

THE TASK: Peekapak asked my team to design a parent platform for their website.

THE PROBLEM: From our research, we discovered that the main issue that parents have with keeping up to date with their child's progress in school is time.

THE SOLUTION: We designed a parent platform that has a dashboard that will help parents stay up to date on their child's progress in school as well as give them access to the at-home activities that they can do with their child.

OUR HYPOTHESIS

Parents would be more involved in their child's learning if there was a more direct method of communication between parent and teacher. 

RESEARCH

A closer look at Peekapak's website...

During our exploration of the Peekapak website, only the teacher platform was available. Teachers would have access to a bookshelf with monthly units that would teach character development. Each unit would include an overview, access to the book of the month, and 4 lesson plans. We kept in mind what the teachers had access to in order to develop a parent platform. 

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

From our competitive analysis, we discovered that Peekapak's top competitors were Class Dojo and Edmodo. What we discovered was that both Class Dojo and Edmodo had a direct communication platform between parents and teachers.

INTERVIEWS

Answers from parents regarding involvement in their child's progress in school. 

We gained the most insight from the interviews that we had conducted with parents and teachers. We discovered that parents just don't have the time to stay up to date with their child's progress in school and they would like an efficient way to do so. Teachers had also mentioned that having direct communication with parents at all times could be very overwhelming. So it was back to the drawing board for us! We changed our hypothesis to be able to design a solution that would allow parents to be more involved in their child's progress in school while making sure that teachers would not be overwhelmed. 

NEW HYPOTHESIS

Parents would be more involved with their child's learning if there was a quick way for them to access the at-home activities. 

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

From our research, were were able to start developing personas. We managed to narrow it down to one primary persona. Meet Julie! 

USER FLOW

Keeping our primary persona Julie in mind, we were able to develop a user flow based off of the Peekapak website. This is our second iteration that was created in Omnigraffle. These are the three paths that a parent can take depending on what time of the month they access the parent platform.  

SKETCHES

Here are some initial sketches of possible interfaces before digitization. 

STORYBOARD

This is a storyboard that I created based off of the persona Julie. It demonstrates how someone with a busy schedule can still be involved in their child's learning in an efficient manner provided by Peekapak.

DESIGN ITERATIONS

Several sketches later, we were able to begin the digitization process. I was in charge of creating a map that would act as the dashboard for the parent platform. The parent would be able to access and unlock the activities that they can do with their child. This map idea was designed to be exciting for a child to explore the Peekapak world with their parent. 

My teammate began digitizing the wireframes while receiving plenty of feedback from the rest of the team during the process. 

USABILITY TESTING

By the time the second iteration of wireframes was complete, we began usability testing on the interactive prototype. After the first run of tests, we realized that the child's profile tab was not noticeable and was often overlooked. Another issue was the flag icon in the activities page. Most testers thought it was a "favorite" button, rather than a negative icon. We made several adjustments after each round of usability testing. 

DELIVERABLE

After much research and several prototype iterations, we came up with a solid solution that satisfies the needs of both the user and the business. The parent can efficiently have access to what their child is learning in school as well as the at-home activities. From the business perspective, Peekapak will be able to offer an exciting way for parents and children to do activities together to reinforce what the child learned at school. 

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