24houranswers.com is a very popular tutoring site with over 250k daily visits. The website was extremely outdated, the experience needed a major uplift and user experience overhaul.
We started by tackling the online portal user experience, which is where active users spend the majority of the time and the part that needed the most work. By improving this experience we were able to get validation from user interviews on the great experience and the portal is set to launch in June 2022.
Role
- Responsible for leading the project from start to finish by collaborating directly with the CEO, project manager, and developers.
- Gathering and understanding requirements and dev capabilities to understand the scope of the work
- Advocating for the user and defending decisions with data and real user feedback.
Key Actions
- Leadership & Ownership
- UX Research & Analysis
- User Testing
- Hi-Fidelity Design
- Development Handoff & Support
Current Experience & Problems
Through conversations with the CEO and PM I learned that the current experience was developed years ago, was outdated, and had a lot of design problems. The task was to fully re-design the member portal experience, improving the user experience, and vastly improving the design. We worked together to gather user feedback and business requirements to determine user goals, what the main focus of the portal should be, and better understanding the end user.
Additionally, the portal and website had to be completed in a few short weeks, so we had to compromise and cut a few steps in the process to meet the MVP deadline. However, I fought for keeping some crucial parts of the design process so we could launch with a better experience and ensure we are solving the right problems. I also fought for implementing analytics and tagging the correct actions so after launch we could gather some data to later work on improvements.
Competitor Research
A crucial part that I could not skip, was conducting some competitor research. This step in the process gave me some important information to understand what industry apps are doing right, wrong, what the expected behaviors and patters were, and what users expect from similar tutoring portals. I looked at over 8 competitors, screenshotted all their flows, and highlighted important actions that they were doing right or wrong.
User Flows
I created a flow map to identify the key screens and actions of the portal. I worked with the PM and dev lead to ensure we weren’t missing any crucial steps and the experience aligned with their engineer requirements. This step allowed me to ensure we had a cohesive flow, identify all pages that need to be designed, and make sure that the information architecture had a clear structure.
The Solutions
😃 Happier Existing Users
WIP Waiting for launch
The Results
The portal is almost done being developed (EST. launch June 2022) so we are waiting for real data to support increase in conversions. However, we tested the final hi-fidelity prototype with 20 existing users and received exemplary results. All 20 users were much happier with the experience, were able to complete their prompted tasks, and were extremely excited for the launch.