CTALK
U of M Class Project
I designed and prototyped a phone app to aid in communication between parents and their children's teachers and other caretakers. It is a way for parents to share information about their child's specific needs and receive feedback and behavior reports, as well as schedule meetings with caretakers.
My Contributions
Project Overview
-
UX/UI Designer
-
Created low and high fidelity prototypes
-
Executed user research
The CTALK (Care Taker Aid and Learning Kit) app facilitates communication among parents, teachers, and caregivers regarding child-specific needs and behaviors. My group focused on prototyping the teacher's end, which involves student profiles containing notes from various caregivers, including parents, past teachers, babysitters, nannies, and camp counselors. The teacher can also schedule meetings and communicate directly with the students' caregivers.
Design Process
Teachers often face the challenge of managing multiple difficult children with limited information about their existing conditions. Having this information could aid in developing effective techniques for addressing each child's specific behavioral needs.
Initially, my group aimed to address this issue through an aesthetically pleasing and intuitive note-sharing feature.
We conducted a competitive analysis to understand existing tools and identify potential features for integration into our solution.
Competitive Analysis
The analysis identified an educational gap for a tool enabling communication and sharing of child-specific care tactics among teachers and caretakers. We sketched potential solutions and initially settled on designing a bracelet-like wearable device for teachers to consolidate information about their students.
Preliminary sketches
We developed multiple personas to gain insight into our target audience's reactions to proposed solutions. Most personas represented primary or secondary users, and we also created a negative persona to guide our design direction.
Carol - Primary persona
After creating personas, my team mapped out real-world scenarios with our primary personas using the wearable device during child tantrums to assess its functionality.
Storyboard/Scenario
Following discussions with our professor and graduate student instructor, my team opted for a more marketable approach and transitioned from the wearable design to an app. We conducted a QOC analysis to determine the optimal initial app design, weighing the pros and cons of each suggested option.
QOC
My team utilized all of the research we had gathered to create a low-fidelity paper prototype.
We tested our paper prototype with our professor, graduate student instructor, and peers, incorporating their feedback to enhance our design. We then used Sketch to create digital screens and defined interactions in InVision. We tested this prototype again, incorporating feedback to develop the final product, which you can try below
Outcomes
This project marked my first experience designing a product from concept to final prototype, highlighting the importance of adaptability as a designer. Initially conceived as a wearable device, we pivoted to a simple app based on user research and persona insights, such as Carol, an older teacher less comfortable with wearables. This experience underscored the significance of UX research and user understanding.
Furthermore, I encountered the challenge of maintaining design consistency across prototype screens while collaborating with a team. We addressed this by creating screen templates and a toolkit of buttons and icons in Sketch, ensuring a cohesive and unified appearance for our prototype, despite being designed by multiple team members.