Improving findability on Parents Gateway
Role: Lead UX Designer
Client: Ministry of Education, Singapore
Challenge
How might we support parents in finding important information on their child’s school matters?
Led design and research in a team of 2 to revamp the homepage and set up the Design System for PG native mobile app
My role
Final design
Originally focused on implementing a search feature, our project expanded into a full redesign of the app's homepage and the introduction of critical features into the product backlog.
Through thorough exploration, we identified the broader challenge of improving navigation and information accessibility. This overhaul was essential to help the team prioritise key features and fulfill our parent users' primary objective of effortlessly staying informed and accessing essential school-related information.
Read on to find out more about the design process.
👇🏻 The process 👇🏻
Overview
Parents Gateway is a one stop platform that aims to help schools and parents strengthen school-home partnership via effective communication.
Teachers can
Create announcements and forms
Create event for parent teacher conference
Disseminate information to parents
Parents can access these these information, events and respond to them accordingly on Parents Gateway
This project came about as the team were receiving feedback requesting for a Search engine as parents were finding it hard to find important information from schools. After initial fact-finding and discussions with engineers regarding search implementation, we discovered that schools often attach PDFs instead of utilizing the description section in form creation. Realizing the limitations of search in scanning attached documents, I advocated for further research to better understand parent users' search behavior and the content they seek
Uncovering painpoints
Parents found the application overwhelming as important information were difficult to locate
They had difficulty differentiating the messages for different children
Parents were unable to differentiate messages that were unread and read
Important elements such as the main menu, were hard to discover
Research methodology
4 rounds of user interviews and usability testings, 3 rounds of user testings and iteration
Conducted virtually via Zoom and Lookback
Research plan and designs were iterated after each round
Goal
Our primary goal is to improve the overall experience and most importantly the navigation of PG for Parents.
To do so, we have to first understand a few things:
Discover how users currently use Parents Gateway mobile application to retrieve relevant information
Understand users’ motivations and mental models when searching for posts on the PG app
To uncover and understand issues that users are facing while interacting with the application
Using what we have found to inform feature prioritisation so that the most useful features can be built first.
Synthesis
We found that:
Parents are time pressed and task oriented.
Parents utilize Parents Gateway not for leisure but with specific objectives to fulfill, seeking to efficiently accomplish their tasks at hand.Parents are most interested in letters containing dates and schedules that are specific to their child.
Parents frequently reference these letters and information throughout the year, prioritising relevant updates over generic MOE HQ announcements and newsletters.Parents typically navigate their search process starting with their child's name, then proceeding to filter by date posted or topic of interest.
Understanding this mental model informs our design approach, enabling parents to swiftly scan and locate the information they require.
Opportunities
01. Revamping the homepage
The previous design had a To-do page where letters that require parents’ attention to read or respond to.
Parents who knew of this feature, found it useful but there was also a large number of parents who didn’t know of this.
How might we effectively guide parents through the app to ensure their attention is directed to crucial tasks?
Moving the To-do page upfront as the default page to make it the first thing that users see when they enter the app.
This clearly tells users what are the things they have to read or respond to. Having a completed tab to signal to users that all posts that no longer need your immediate response have been moved there for reference.
Before
After
“I suppose bringing it upfront or rather to the top makes it easier to, like, I think number one discover that, oh, there's this feature. And I think number two like, oh, okay, that's something for me to prioritise. At least I know what are the things outstanding that I need to do.”
Father of 2, user of PG
1.1. Child filters & cards
The child filters and cards make up the bulk of the homepage. To improve the homepage, we zoomed in on fixing the glaring issues with child filters and cards.
We identified the following issues:
Child filters were hard to discover. Parent did not know that they could filter the posts by child.
Parents found it hard to identify unread posts
Parents found the contrast for our main navigation page too low and hence, missed out on key pages such as To-Do
Before
After
Unread form cards without cover photo
Unread announcment cards without cover photo
Before
After
02. Introduced a new feature: Save post
Without any means to save for future reference, parents' resort to screenshotting and saving letters that contain important information to their own personal photo album, or sending it to their child/spouse.
To empower parents to utilise PG as the 1 stop platform for all their child matters, we wanted to make looking back on important information easy with a way to allow them to save posts.
How might we allow parents to easily find posts that they tend to refer to throughout the semester?
“All these messages, some are, some are worth starring or keeping for later references. So in a way I think the starred messages helps to take note of those. And then like you could go back and try to find those messages, or rather in a way, how I then deal with it today is that I would screenshot it and keep it somewhere in my own like, keep folder so that I could refer to it.”
Father of 2, user of PG
03. Free text search
We explored having ‘Search’ and ‘Filters’. However, after speaking to users, we found that users prefers using keyword search as filtering requires a higher cognitive effort to determine how the letters are categorised.
How might we allow parents to find posts that they did not save/star?
Initially, we harbored reservations regarding the efficacy of a basic search feature, given its inability to sift through attachments. However, our skepticism was dispelled upon engaging with users.
We discovered that a straightforward keyword search proved immensely valuable to parents, particularly in scenarios where they hadn't retained the actual document. Moreover, the titles and descriptions typically utilized by schools inherently contain an ample array of keywords, facilitating effective search functionality.
“If I know what filters to use… of course it’s good. If I know, if I know the keyword then I will do a search. Because filter… normally the category may not make sense to me. It’s something that the school defines. Unless I know their definition then its good for me. So I think search is more relevant to me.”
Mother of 2, user of PG
Final design