Find-A-Tutor

The primary aim was to create an easy to use app that connects students and Tutors. The app needed to cater for:

1. Tutors looking to advertise private lessons
2. Students searching for Tutors.

The secondary aim of the app is to create a platform that enables Tutors and students to consolidate and manage their bookings.

To kick the project off we ran a workshop to map the apps vision and goals so we had a clear understanding of the platforms ideation, what we needed to achieve as an MVP and begin to think about how we can accomplish this.

It was important to conduct a competitor analysis to evaluate: how other similar platforms tackled similar challenges we faced; what elements and features work well and could help us achieve our goals for the app and understand which elements have been implemented that we may have not considered or initially not included in our vision.

Although it was initially clear that we had two user types, students & tutors, it was important to create and design personas to help us understand the users experiences and goals. Each persona has different motivations, frustrations, needs and tasks that the platform will need to cater to. By creating and designing the platform with these personas at the centre of our focus we can get a thorough understanding of the features required that will influence the UX design. By working through this process, we identified there is actually a third user persona: parent/guardian/carer of students looking for a Tutor on the students behalf. This persona would still fall under the student persona category but is important to consider features that would include them in the platform and cater to their needs.

We conducted user interviews to validate our personas and enhance our understanding of the users experience and usability. We designed the interviews as semi-structured 1:1 interview sessions using improvised questions where appropriate to further explore a users response. It was imperative that we designed the interviews to focus on exploring and understanding our design objectives whilst providing a format that allowed the users to respond in an open way. The main themes of the interview questions were: motivations for using a tutor app, frustrations with using a tutor app, features they felt were useful and features they would suggest.

We used a thematic analysis to analyse the data from the interviews which allowed us to identify any patterns of our themes. To organise the users data we: transcribed the interviews, highlighted key phrases that informed our themes and then plotted these into an affinity map. This helped us organise a huge amount of data in an easy to digest and easy to view format. From this analysis we were able to conclude that users:

• Want to reduce time consuming tasks such as searching/posting across multiple platforms
• Need to be able to easily communicate to book initial/future lessons
• Need an easy to view and easy to use platform
• Want features such as integrated calendars and tutor ratings to enhance their experience

This influenced the core functions/features we designed for the app.

Once all the functions/ features had been compiled, finalised and validated, we created a content map starting with each core function: Sign In/My Account, Register and Advert Search. As the app has two sets of users (tutors and students) it was important to modify items such as ‘my account’ to have different elements relevant to the student/tutor profile but to also create consistency between both.

From here we created a paper prototype and conducted further user testing to validate the user journeys and interactions. This was an important ethnographic research exercise to understand how the users navigate through the app and verify if this matches with the journeys we mapped. It was beneficial to gain user feedback on any missing steps or choices we hadn’t anticipated to develop our design.