UX Case Study: PowWow Academy
This one’s for the kids!
PowWow Academy is a campaign meant to encourage kids to make healthy decisions for themselves rather than taking a more traditional approach of lecturing, and our client, Caroline’s plan for this was to use a mixture of workshops, songs, activities and worksheets to make this happen.
One thing that was prevalent from the very first encounter with the existing was one of the websites main USP’s — the Super Food Heroes.
Our client had created rich, engaging characters that she had created with the specific intention of giving kids fun, interactive role models to look up to for healthy inspiration. The idea was charming, the characters were beautifully brought to life and she was doing something great for kids with her creative talents, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in with the Superfood Heroes.
Business Goals:
1. Bring traffic to selling the CD/Songs
2. Sell the worksheet
3. Sell the workshops
4. Encouraging longer term engagement at 3x a week
All lending towards the ultimate goal, which was to get the message out there:
“Empower children with the knowledge and courage they need to make healthy decisions for themselves.”
The Team
My Role
Working in a team of three we made clear decisions on accountability from the beginning so that we could effectively split up certain tasks between us due to the time constraints, playing to each of our strengths within the UX process. Although we all actively contributed to each phase I personally took slightly more responsibility within the Planning and Design phases of the process.
Because our client, Caroline, needed a more solid understanding of her competitors, as well as a deeper understanding about how her product would translate online, our research phase began broadly and as we went along we realised there were several things that we had to hone in on more specifically.
I like to think of it as ‘finding the why’, because I feel that much of research is honing in on exactly why the product exists and what it’s doing for the user (USPs), and basing the design concept on that, and that the research process is a funnel of sorts to identify the answer to this.
We began with looking into these areas:
1. Where parents and teachers were currently going online for advice, activities, worksheets and songs
2. Methods used by parents and teachers already to engage children (to understand which methods that Caroline already offered that the website should focus on the most)
3. Who to target specifically and in what combination (i.e parents and teachers, parents and kids, just kids, just parents…)
What was perhaps one of the most useful research processes ended up being a mixture of Competitive Comparative Research as well as getting quality one on one interviews with parents and teachers.
I constructed the Competitive Comparative Grid in which I looked at 25 websites that we had compiled as a team that offered similar services to the ones that Caroline offered. The main areas I was investigating in each of these websites included:
- Who they engaged: teachers, parents, kids, or a combination of any of the three
- The content: nutrition, fitness, mental health, or a combination of these
- Types of resources: including activities, songs, media, worksheets, advice, games etc and in what combination
The results of this were much more telling than I would have thought, and after compiling the information into visual data, I was able to find a ‘sweet spot’ that PowWow could fill in the domain, a place that not many other online resources were acknowledging
Therefore, a successful website would:
It was during the completion of this process that I learned a great deal about the importance of this kind of research in itself. Although I had constructed these grids before, I had never had to do it to such an extent and I took the opportunity to make it worthwhile. I compiled and turned it to quantitative data to try and determine the best route for Caroline to take in who to engage with, what to include, and a few extra insights on what her product special.
User Research
As we did a few initial user interviews alongside doing comparative competitive research, we found new elements that were unthought of that we realised we needed to focus on.
For example, many teachers and parents alike, and without prompting, mentioned that they felt one of the biggest obstacles that they felt needed to be overcome in the way that health, nutrition and mental health was currently being taught was that most of the traditional methods didn’t take into account the fact that children learn in different ways.
Our user research included a total of 29 parents (18 surveys, 11 interviews) and 15 teachers (7 surveys, 9 interviews).
Affinity Diagram
Key Takeaways:
Research Summary
So we knew that the website would need to target Parents and Teachers, have a combination of Songs, Activities, Workshops and Worksheets, and cover Mental, Physical and Nutrition.
We knew from user research that important elements to the users were going to be acknowledging learning styles, variety, positive role models, ongoing engagement and a safe environment.
One of the most important elements that we noticed was that both parents and teachers were much more likely to take advice/trust people that were parents and/or teachers themselves.
This was paramount to our process — although there were many unique elements of the website, our most valuable asset was going to end up being our client, Caroline, herself.
Armed with the Powwow-er of knowledge (I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself) we headed into the planning phase, we wanted to have another meeting with Caroline to outline the direction we were heading in and knew that to be effective we needed some good user personas to start with.
Transitioning from Research to Planning was somewhat difficult for us as a team. It’s possible that due to the initial fog of confusion that we were struggling through in the beginning of the project, being able to do masses of research was somewhat comforting to us as a team, and we felt that we’d barely cleared the fog when it was time to put the research into something solid that would eventually become a prototype.
Personas
Based on frequencies that we found within the user research, we created the teacher persona based on a lot of the goals and pain points that we had identified within the user research.
We created two personas as the website was aimed at both teachers and parents, however were much more focused on the teacher side of things, for the reason that teachers would be more likely to book workshops.
Teacher:
Parent:
We constructed two possible routes to take, keeping in mind that Caroline had outlined that she wanted users to engage with the website at least 3 times a week.
Acknowledging the Business Goals
Upon our second meeting with Caroline we had found two possible routes to take that would acknowledge the business goals that we set out with. From our research we had gathered it would be difficult to sell CDs and worksheets online, the online market for these were ridiculously oversaturated, however it was her combination of services offered that would be an attractive ‘package’ deal.
The strategy we settled upon was to use the workshops to sell the CD’s and worksheets. This strategy would allow us to focus primarily on Caroline’s personality and story, and sell the worksheets and songs as supporting material to her workshops to encourage ongoing engagement with the programme for kids. This ‘cycle of support’ would acknowledge many of the business goals as well as directly recognising some of the user goals as well the overall goal i.e ‘kids need ongoing routine and varied resources’.
Storyboard
Customer Journey Map
The customer journey map was a huge help to us — we were able to identify two big dips and realised something that we hadn’t thought of before that led to an extra feature on the site.
The first thing we realised in doing this was that the booking of a workshop wouldn’t necessarily occur within the first visit to the website.
Teachers who were looking through dozens of workshop sites within a short time limit were likely to have to do initial research into a potential workshop booking, and then take key pieces of information, such as price and content, to other members of staff.
Booking a relatively costly item such as a school workshop isn’t a spur of the moment thing — we had to make sure that we were designing the website with a specific timeframe in mind and acknowledge the fact that it wasn't a lone decision — teachers would likely have to get confirmation from colleagues. This was something we created a specific feature for later.
User Flow
Site Map
At this point we had a pretty succinct idea of what we needed to be focusing on for the design phase
Design Concepts + Personality
We began the design phase with clear goals in mind and wanted to create a succinct personality on which we could base our design choices. Based on our research and our user we applied these three concepts as personality traits throughout the website.
Low Fidelity Paper Prototypes
A big change we made was inspired by things that we noticed about the current website from the very beginning that we knew had to be changed, for example the home page didn’t outline exactly what the service did right away. We tried to solve this by implementing a carousel on the homepage, the first page of which dictated what exaclty the business did and moving on to focus on Caroline herself, her blog, and the superheroes.
- Website is directed at parents and teachers, but should be clear the workshops and activities are directed towards kids
- Different parts of the website were skewed differently towards either teacher or parent
- Our biggest point of focus was Caroline — based on much of our research we knew that she was one of the main USPs, parents would trust her expertise for being another parent,
- Narrative for the ‘about us’ page — important to think about language as well as the emotional component when it comes to kids
- Language was also important in getting over the personality of the website.
- Succinct personality for the website.
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Main points:
- We tried to use visualised statistics that were on the previous website, but realized that it would be more effective for parents and teachers to also translate the cold statistics to real instances that parents and teachers would really recognise.
- Had to change some of the language
- Skewed different pages to be more suited to different personas
- Top menu bar, had to change language a few times over
High Fidelity
The Homepage
When designing the homepage we wanted to ensure that we were featuring the most important parts of the website, as well as ensuring that users knew exactly what the website did from the beginning.
Creating a Narrative (What We Do Page)
One thing was incredibly clear to us from the beginning and something that I find is one of my strengths as a UX designer (finally, that screenwriting degree is coming in handy! And they said it was an expensive mistake!) was creating a narrative for users to buy into. People love stories. It’s what we base our whole lives on. So we had to build some stories that people would love.
We knew that the What We Do page was going to be crucial to getting users to engage with the website so we spent a great deal of time constructing a narrative around the page, ensuring we were selling Caroline, giving the users as many opportunities as possible to engage with other areas of the website, and fully connect to the ideology on an emotional level.
Important Features
1. Downloadable Presentation and Info for Teachers
The downloadable presentation for teachers or parents to be able to show others made it easy for people to be able to have something to download to show other people, teachers would be able to show their colleagues and parents would be able to show other parents — the presentation itself would be able to be designed specifically for different uses, such as pamphlet form, presentation form or poster form — could also help schools market the event in order to get more interest.
2. Ask Caroline
This needed a little fine tuning between mid and high fidelity due to the fact that people weren’t sure if this was some kind of blog or agony aunt thing, being able to properly define what this was was paramount to make it clearer to the user.
3. Recommended Resources
Presentation
Okay, we did a bad thing. (Learning curve, learning curve!) We had a relatively high amount of confidence in our design, as we had been careful to back up our design choices with carefully extracted data and research. But our presentation to the client was lacking — to say the least. I think it was because we were genuinely just a little overexcited about the project and rambled through it a tad.
It all goes to show that you can get the process right all the way through and have a good product, but if you don’t put as much careful design thought into the way in which you’re showing off your product, you may as well have not done it at all.
We learn from our mistakes, right? (I learned, I swear! I swear!)
If there was more time…
- Creating a space for parents and teachers to communicate — this was a concept that we had explored when we offered Caroline one of two specific strategies to follow, as this was something that we had found in a lot of our user research but had to discard. Both parents and teachers said that the biggest obstacle they faced with their students was the fact that it was difficult to impart any kind of change within a child’s life if the school and parents weren’t both on the same page — would have been great to be able to use the website as a kind of platform for this to happen however the practical implication of this would have been ridiculously complicated.
- Engaging kids directly — there were many websites online that engaged kids directly however none of them that had the rest of Caroline’s USPs and it would have been fantastic to add some more media that would have directly engaged kids, but once again, this was something more suited to future development.
- Focusing on the routine and ongoing engagement aspect of it: wanted to add in a ‘scheduling’ app of sorts within it.
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