PeerSquared- reimagined & redesigned

6 min readNov 13, 2020

Private peer tutoring online platform for ambitious students and empathetic tutors.

Our next project prompt was to work on a client project Peer-Squared, an online tutoring platform for schools to help student grow and share. Prompt was to re-design their current booking platform and propose new business model.

I was super excited to kick-off this project for few reasons, one is the topic that means a lot to me, a meaningful education access to all kids. Second, it was a team project which means I’ll get to learn from some very talented individuals and same time will able to share some of my key strengths with them.

TEAM WORK IS A DREAM WORK

Nastya Kwak (Product Manager)- Niketa Misco (Research Lead)- Me (Interactions Lead)

We were given little over two weeks to deliver full research, synthesize, ideate, design, user testing and mid-fidelity prototype on Axure .We knew what the problem is so we dive in the project using sprint method.

As a team we decided our daily agenda and penned the timeline to make sure things are done timely manner and no fall backs. Team bonding was important for an efficient outcome so project manager conducted scrumbs in the beginning of each team meeting which was a huge success to clean up any hurdles and struggles and built support within the team.

Though we had our designated profile yet we all participated in all aspects of the project. One of the team members did SWOT analysis to pin down key pain points and needs and I conducted Competitive Analysis two ways- Plus/ Delta Method to discover pros and cons and Features Inventory of other similar tutoring platforms to better understand what all features can be improved and implemented in Peer-Squared .

By now, we had good idea on pre-research and we were ready to move on to next stage of user research — we put together a plan and implemented step by step.

Context: Tutoring platform needs to engage more students and tutors, change its business model for profitability
Objectives: Find users insights, pain points and needs to create a mid-fidelity prototype
Audience: Tutors, parents, students
Locations: Zoom, in-person
Methods: Screener survey, task analysis, card sorts, interviews, usability tests (2 rounds)
Schedule: Screener surveys 75,Task analysis (internally), card sorting , interviews, usability tests (1 round by end of week 6; 2 round early in week 7)
Outcomes: User insights and findings, User needs, user-centric solutions, persona and journey map
Screener surveys: Created survey together and share on different platforms such Facebook groups, slack channels, reddit , emails.
Card sorting: create labels, do open sorting and closed sorting if have time
Interviews: Mind mapping, User interview questions
Usability test: Create scenarios/tasks

Next after we collected the screen survey results, we chose our potential interviewee and then we created list of questions for our user interviews via mind mapping , conducted open cart sorting and ran the task analysis on current platform for both student and tutor.

All three team members ran intensive user interviews individually via zoom and in-person if possible. Here is what we summed up afterwards…

This lead us to tons of information collectively and insights. We all conducted affinity mapping of our own research and filtered down key trends, insights & findings.

Quotes from Users

Intensive and very focused trends helped us pin down key themes and for timeline purposes we chose top two.

Trust
1on1 and group session options
Community
Long term package options for better payment plans

We Synthesized the needs and goals of user after recognizing the key pain points. Our users are looking for a platform that they can trust first before commit. They are looking for flexibility yet suitable options to cater their needs at best. They are looking for easy, simplified and resourceful experience. We firmly believed that our two key themes chosen to move forward are the right choice.

By now team were so ready to put ink on paper and ready to sketch it away so we adopted design studio method and shared with each other our ideas and artifacts /examples to support. Edited and chosen the best options out of three and solidified the sketches and sketched user flows for better understanding the user task.

CREATE. PITCH. CRITIQUE

After multiple rounds of sketching and iterations, we felt comfortable to jump on Axure for mid-fidelity protoype. We spent five days to finish our final prototype for user testing but before that we did many layers of testing within oursleves using same scenario as prepared for users . We were working on both student and teacher as users so it was evident to create both scenarios and conduct both testings. After making iterations and cleaning up bugs we felt quite confident with our robust prototype.We provided users these scenarios and few task to accomplish.

We did two rounds of user testing with total of 8 users and discovered some robust pain points and iterated further. This gave us good idea where we stand to create user journey map and lead towards our final prototype

KEY PAIN POINTS