Role

UX/UI Designer

Client

Avela

Duration

3 months

Connecting kids to the right schools

Overview

Avela’s mission is to allocate resources and match individuals to opportunities. With a focus on education, they want to empower school districts to offer parents a choice in finding the right fit for their children. Our team of 4 UX Designers created features to enhance the user experience on the school finder service, based on actual research.

My role was the UX Designer/Researcher to make key decisions during the design process with research in mind from user interviews and worked with my team to exchange feedback with the Avela members.

Opportunity

  • Parents need a better way to find a school for their children that best fits their busy lifestyle

  • Design a mobile first school finder web application based on research data of Avela target users in the U.S.

Designing and prototyping

What do users think about Avela’s experience?

We conducted a remote usability test with 12 users across 2 rounds. We provided tasks for them to complete.

Tasks included:

  • Check the ratings/reviews of a school

  • Apply to a school that has a STEM program

  • Compare 2 schools

  • Find a catholic school

What worked?

  • Intuitive navigation for the bottom 3 icons

  • Adding a preference button to the home screen to refine searches

  • A share button to increase engagement between users

Outcomes

Through our research, we helped the Avela team understand some of the pain points parents have during the school enrollment process. Initially, I expected some resistance to the pivot we proposed to Abrey (Lead Engineer), but I was surprised by our client's receptiveness and open-mindedness. He understood the reasoning with the research supporting the pivot, and he was all for it.

Our team met with Abrey and Sophia (Product Designer) outside our normal sprint meetings a couple of times to continue discussing our project. Building a strong collaboration with Greg/Abrey/Sophia helped us maintain open, clear communication throughout our entire project. I was surprised by openness