The platform had a basic feature of one-way messaging but with the reaction to 2020 and new restrictions in schools, we needed a solution for families to reply back to teachers within the app. The main problems we were solving for were:

How to thread messages

Effective way to organize messages for different leveled users (a teacher vs. an administrator of the school).

How directors can have a customized, in-depth insight into all communication going in and out of their center.

The big question we had to answer for this project before starting designs was about how to thread messages.Without reinventing the wheel, we had 4 options:

We narrowed it down to 2 based on customer needs and user stories so to make a decision, I wireframed the ideas for a visual.

We decided on the inbox solution for 2 main reasons:

The ability for all users to have their own inbox would make it easier to manage.

Users wouldn't be able to have a 1-to-1 conversation with families when there's a shared inbox, and that was a customer priority.

The product becomes more complicated because we have multiple user levels. Answering questions such as:‍

I explored a few workflows for user stories based on problems we found, specifically for each user level.

For the final solution, what we ultimately decided on was a filtering system so you can truly oversee all communication at once. We also added an archive function to easily clear out inboxes and not be overwhelmed.