Educents Sign-up Flow & Personalization
Educents is a ventured-backed marketplace to help homeschool parents discover educational resources provided by a community of independent sellers and small businesses. My role as a product designer was to build and refine the Educents brand by expanding our value proposition and design a multi-faceted platform around empowering parents through connecting community, content, product listings and local learning activities.
Winter 2018
In Collaboration with CEO
Product Design, User Interface Design
User Experience Design
Time: 1.5 Months
Problem
Overview
With our current homepage design, it was unclear what our business was about, based on our initial user feedback from people who were within our target audience and whom were not. "What are we?" "What does our business provide?" We were lacking a call to action, which results in high bounce rates on our homepage. Our product was confusing; therefore, our brand is nonexistent.
Hypothesis
We believe that providing relevant parenting resources, information, educational products, and learning activities for active & homeschool parents, we will achieve:
1. Empowering our active parents to feel confident their children will grow into successful independent young adults (the Active Parent’s ultimate personal achievement)
2. Create trust within our user base and elevate our brand by expanding our value proposition
We will know this to be true when we see strong, powerful, and growing repeat engagement metrics across the platform.
Research
Overview
After reviewing our user interviews with our customers, we learned many behavioral factors that helped us decide how to reshape the homepage. Some examples:
• Most of our users filter by grade levels before consider looking through subject-based materials.
• Many parents preferred to read about best methods in teaching their kids or recommended curriculums before purchasing.
• Almost all parents are full of questions and are unsure what to teach and how to build a curriculum.
We saw this as an opportunity to craft a solution to improve user experience, while making it apparent of who we are and what we provide as a business, for new users and current users whom land on our homepage.
Use-case (Example)
Leslie searches Google and finds Educents. She begins to look around to try to figure where to go to help her son. She eventually finds the right levels and locates both some interesting math products to use at home with her son and some amazing local science after-school programs. She relies on ratings and comments from other parents to figure out which ones to choose.
Goal
Creating a multi-faceted platform around empowering parents through connecting community, content, product listings and local learning activities.
• Advise users to filter their child's grade-level on the hero image, as a call to action, when looking for resources and implying that we are an educational businesses
• Displaying our our 5-tier of different resources on the homepage for personalization after the user selects a grade (educational products, expert blog content, parenting community forum questions, local kid activities, and quizzes)
• Using their personalization grade attribute to filter and suggest relevant material throughout the site
• Adding an extra step during the sign-up flow asking for their child's grade level
