School Community Newsfeed Optimization

Product:

The HEARD newsfeed is a central meeting point for parents to stay up-to-date on what's going on in their child's classroom and afterschool groups.

Problem the product addresses:

Show relevant updates in the HEARD newsfeed so that parents don't overlook critical information shared by fellow classroom parents or school faculty

Why this problem?

Parents checking in on HEARD have reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of updates, even missing critical updates 

Role in the project:

Design lead for a team of 5 designers, defining the design strategy after the research phase

Approach:

Research

During the research phase, we interviewed current parents who are active and inactive on the HEARD platform to learn more about their pain points and experiences as parents.

After each interview, each parent went through a card sort activity to organize existing posts into categories and prioritize those categories according to that parent's level of importance. We met as a team to identify themes in the categories and priorities. From there, we aligned on an initial prioritized list of category types.

We also synthesized the qualitative data we gathered and created parent personas.

Using a Jobs to Be Done framework, we identified the core problem that parents identified as current users of the HEARD platform.

Design

We are currently in the process of creating low-fidelity designs to address smart default notification settings as well as an evolution of the post creation experience so that content is easier to categorize and prioritize.