New Onboarding Process for Parents

Product:

HEARD is a social network for classroom parents to stay up-to-date on their child’s life and connect with one another to coordinate school or extracurricular activities.

Problem:

The founders of the product have an active and enthusiastic user base of parents, but new parents who joined the platform weren’t aware of its full roster of features or what distinguishes HEARD from similar products in the ecosystem.

Why this problem?

HEARD had been around for about a year and the founders felt that it was important to resolve this issue in order to grow the user base.

Role in the project:

Designer in a team of 7 designers

Approach:

Try out the product ourselves

To get our feet wet, we onboarded onto the platform and independently wrote down user feedback we had for the product, discussing its strengths and weaknesses with one another. While we were not in the target audience, this primed us to anticipate any themes of user feedback we’d get from parents.

Conduct usability tests with parents unfamiliar with the product

We reached out to 6 parents who had never used HEARD before and asked them a series of questions to learn more about the trials and tribulations they faced as a parent. From there, we conducted usability tests to gather feedback on what they interpreted.

Of the 6 parents, I myself reached out to 2 industry colleagues who had children in elementary school. They were gracious enough to set aside time over coffee to share their perspectives.

One thing I noticed was that one parent was very talkative and our interview ran overtime, while the other parents kept answers brief. In the future, I'd aim to be more precise with the time estimate.

The test results from the parents we interviewed mirrored our own concerns that we jotted down when engaging with the product, but that could easily be confirmation bias. In order to counter that and learn more about the true value the product brings to its user base, we needed more information about how the parent community engages with the HEARD product.

We conducted interviews with HEARD parents to learn more about their lifestyle and how they make HEARD a part of their lives, bringing our insights and identifying themes from the interviews conducted by the design team.

We made simple personas and job stories to reflect our findings.

To be completely honest, the findings for these personas led to mixed feedback from the HEARD founders, who expected much more nuance and range. In my previous product management work, I've often said similar feedback to new user researchers covering their first assignments and believe the user research with the existing user base is more to the benefit of the design team than the client stakeholders who hold tribal knowledge they may take for granted.

With the test results, we wanted to test changes to HEARD's value proposition that would match to the ideal school dynamics that parents described and addressed the privacy concerns that parents had when they first encountered the product. We used some of the feedback from the existing users as preliminary copy when we started identifying the components that should be core to the new onboarding experience.

Design

(In progress.)