Case Study: Living Room Tutors
Conducted by:
Lisa Zampogna
ROLES
Research, Evaluation, Interviews, Design
LOCATION:
Twin Cities
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Google Suite, Google Slides, Excalidraw
Deliverables
Strategy Statement, Strategy Map, Feature Cards, Personas, Journey Maps and Video Presentation
Skills / Services
Know / Don’t know / Assume Activity, Stakeholder Interview, Deep Dive Research, Stakeholder Interviews, Low fidelity feature concepts, Personas, and Journey Mapping
Purpose:
Develop Multi-Touchpoint Strategy for Not-for-Profit Online Remote Tutoring Service
Overview
Living Room Tutors is a not-for-profit organization founded by Jinglin Li, who was a junior in high school in March 2020. As a high school junior home in lockdown during the early days of the pandemic she saw her younger siblings needing assistance with their school work during distance learning. She realized the situation was widespread and she took it upon herself to help the situation.
Living Room Tutors (LRT) was created to match volunteer student tutors with students in need of (virtual) tutoring. Once matched, the students and tutors are responsible for setting up schedules, meeting platforms and determining the length and frequency of the sessions.
The Objective
LRT approached our team to get help developing a user-focused strategy to improve the experience of their participants. They emphasize the areas of community outreach, delivering clear program guidelines and expectations, on-boarding and exit procedures. Some other concerns centered around building a good reputation and credibility in their community to increase use of their program.
Focus Area
Primary Users
Living Room Tutors serve three user groups in the course of achieving the goal of facilitating matching and training for tutors:
- Tutees/Students looking for information about the program, how to sign up and when the meetings are setup
- Parents looking explanation of services, what is included, timeframe and logistic information.
- Tutors interact to receive tutor training, resources, scheduling notes, fill out feedback forms and track volunteer hours.
Secondary Users
- LRT volunteers uses website to accomplish tasks around organizing and facilitating tutor/tutee matching/training/communication
Know, Don't Know, Assume Activity
Our design team began our analysis of Living Room Tutors by completing an activity to identify what was known, unknown and assumptions we've made while learning more about the organization. We synthesized the results of this activity to identify themes found among our design team and used this information to prepare questions for our stakeholder interview.
We had the opportunity to meet with the operations leader at the Living Room Tutors organization. LRT's input gave us insight into their values and priorities, goals and possible action items. We also learned more about the inner workings of the organization and where some of their pain points have come up.
StaKe Holder Interview
We had the opportunity to meet with the operations leader at the Living Room Tutors organization. LRT's input gave us insight into their values and priorities, goals and possible action items. We also learned more about the inner workings of the organization and where some of their pain points have come up.
Competitive Audit and Secondary Research
After the stakeholder interview my team and I continued to do more research into the tutoring space to better understand what users need/expect and like. As we determined our priorities for how to continue we developed a strategy statement.
Guiding Strategy Statement
All user experience touch points for Living Room Tutors will help Tutor/Tutees/Parents to feel confident and/or supported so that they are able to foster academic and personal development.
We will do this by focusing on system structures of operations, safety, performance metrics, and engagement.
As a result we hope to see improvements of credibility, sustainability and accountability.
Personas
Persona:
Donny
Donovan is a high school Senior. He is looking for some ways to volunteer. Donovan loves working with kids and thought that being a tutor would be both a rewarding experience and something he could add to his college application. Once Donovan was approved to tutor he learned he had been matched with a student who had special learning needs. Donovan didn’t feel equipped to handle the situation and found that there were no guidelines or resources provided to help. Donald felt frustrated and questioned wether tutoring was the best thing for him after all.
Persona:
Andy and Ira
Andy is a 5th grader. He loves fishing and being outdoors with his Dad, Ira. Recently, Andy started falling behind in math. Ira is looking into finding some tutoring services to help Andy with math. At first, things were great. Andy really liked his tutor but as time went on Andy was getting a new tutor every week and there were even times that the tutors did not show up. As the service became less and less reliable Ira began to question the credibility of the program and wondered if it would be better to look for resources somewhere else.
User Journeys
In its current state, Living Room Tutors lacks touch points that help provide support and training to new tutors. This can cause issues downstream for tutees and their parents in ways that compromise credibility and trust.
Providing more support to the tutors will be an effective way to not only improve the tutee/guardian experiences, but also allow tutors to grow, learn and connect better with their tutees. This will result in his increased satisfaction, growth and success.
The future state of the application, along with these features, will improve both Donny’s integrity as a tutor and Ira and Andy’s user journey by fostering a positive experience along with increased trust in the organization.
Strategy Plan
With LRT's goal of growing its organization by recruiting more tutees and tutors to connect, along with its aim to increase user confidence, trust, retention and referrals, some key opportunity areas of improvement were identified.
Credibility
- Build more robust tutor vetting and application process
- Develop training resources and materials for new tutors
- Develop support systems for active tutors including ongoing tutor feedback and note taking to promote accountability in tutor/tutees, note retention for transfer of students and volunteer hour tracking.
Feature Concepts
At this this point I brainstormed five key designs around areas of opportunity found in the previous research steps. Knowing the development resource was constrained, we met with the developer to learn more about how long each feature concept would take. We were tasked with developing designs up to 20 points, where 1 point was one day of development. Our team set to work ideating and we came up with 85 ideas that were narrowed down to 10 feature concepts that were prioritized and put in front of users for a kano analysis.
Touchpoint Prototypes
Annotations include explanations for the features. Below are the features I designed.
Video Presentation
Our team delivered a video to our clients with our suggestions.
Conclusion
Through exploring the user experience from the perspectives of Donny, Ira and Andy, we’ve been able to determine some areas in Living Room Tutor’s operations, application and tutor training that could be improved to increase user success and satisfaction.
The expansion of LRT marketing will increase credibility and outreach for the organization. A more conscientious onboarding process and updates to the tutor/tutee application will allow for a credible and genuine matching system. Providing tutors with resources through the toolkit will ensure they are supported throughout the tutoring process. User satisfaction can be ensured through tracking, survey feedback and testimonials.
Below is a video by team delivered to Living Room Tutors sharing some of our ideas with them.
Next Steps
Usability Testing
Testing the usability of the proposed touch points would be important to gain insight into the features value with users to gauge which are the highest priority to implement.
Expansion of Touch Point Features
Development of certain areas of the website could help to create in infrastructure that would support growth up users and allow scalability of the organization. These features could include things like a tutor and tutee dashboard as well as other backend management of the user process and matching from LRT. Development on these would need to include more UX research, competitive audits, prototypes and user testing as well as sitemaps and other hierarchical information organization.
Further Research Into Other Touch Points
Further research into other touch points. Evaluate after first round of development what pain points are most impactful to the users and proceed with those that create more structure and support for tutors and provide credibility to the overall structure of the organization.
