Parent Portal Redesign

Sam Spencer

UX Researcher

UX Designer

UI Designer

Sketch

Big Idea

Convert the Parent Portal web app into a hybrid app - a single codebase for web, iOS, and Android.

In the process, redesign the Parent Portal home, navigation, and grades experience.

Incorporate mobile features like fingerprint authentication and push notifications while maintaining usability across various screen sizes.

Business Objectives

Increase Parent Portal adoption.

Improve parent engagement.

Reduce student attrition.

Success Metrics

Doubled total users

$10,000's saved

5,400 parent hours saved and counting!

Real customer quote:

Very streamlined! Much better than having to ho through the website to get to the portal! Thank you for developing this!!!

Process

Discovery

Design

Development

Discovery

Conduct User Research

Exploratory research revealed varied attitudes about parent portals among parents:

I like that if I want to know how my kids are doing, I can find that out without having to interrupt the teacher. If I have a specific question, I can go here first without having to bother a teacher.

I really don’t care about seeing all the notifications. I just want to know if there’s a problem I need to address.

Finding out about my children’s poor grades on an assignment during the day while they’re at school just makes me upset before they get home.

Define the Problem

Problem Statement

A parent of an NHA student who feels cheated out of their time and frustrated about intervening in their student's academics needs to log in to the Parent Portal but faces a non-native experience with a login wall.

Design

Organize the Information

Guiding Principle

Parents want to see their children front and center, and they want to quickly and easily get to their grades.

Menu: Before & After

Conducting a content inventory on the Parent Portal revealed a natural organization. Using first principle thinking, I broke the content areas into their component parts, for instance:

Student Specific Content

Student Agnostic Content

System Content

Student Profile: Before

The old student profile was too visually noisy and distracting. Parents return to the Parent Portal to see grades. Wading through all the visual clutter caused extra cognitive burden. On top of that, grade details were buried four levels deep in the hierarchy.

I redesigned the grades summary to be the first thing you see when selecting a student, and made grades details just two levels deep. I moved the extraneous content into a tabbed navigation so it could be accessed when needed and be hidden when it wasn’t (which was most of the time).

Student Profile: After

Set Aesthetic Vision

I aimed for clean, clear, and highly usable. Where possible, show a child’s face. As a new parent myself, I knew parents simply don’t get tired of seeing their smiling children.

I tied everything together with a repeating background pattern, a thematic element present in the Parent Portal and the schools’ websites.

I did a complete redesign of the icon set to be more consistent and demand less attention. I added a card element with shadows to give the illusion of lifting the content off the screen. It was all about little touches that could make the content parents care about stand out.

Redesigned #1 Feature: Grades

The most important feature was grades. So I gave it extra attention. I started by understanding deeply the relationships of the parts through an entity relationship diagram.

Then I iterated until I got the look and feel just right.

Development

While I didn’t write any code, I don’t consider my job done until the experience is shipped and being used. Being able to work well with developers is very important to me. I put a lot of effort and time into building relationships, understanding preferred communication styles, and generally being a good collaborator.

In this stage, I wrote user stories, did evaluative testing, provided guidance on implementation details, negotiated trade-offs, and answered any questions that inevitably arose. I also created assets for the app store listing, wrote the description copy, made some training materials, and generally did whatever I could to support the developer working on the release.

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Posted Jan 15, 2024

I redesigned NHA's Parent Portal app, saving thousands of hours and dollars and doubling the user base from 13,000 to 26,000 users.

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Clients

National Heritage Academies