I led the UX, UI and research on a two-person team with Brightwheel, a "Shark Tank" funded, real-time student update platform that strengthened bonds between early childhood educators and parents.

I helped build an iOS messaging feature that solved users exiting the app with a 90% user success rate, enabling educators and parents to trust messages, increase daily engagement, and created a valuable feature to grow platform adoption.

“We didn’t design...to be forward thinking”

Brightwheel, was providing an outmoded messaging feature that worked like a broken email inbox.

It confused users.

Messages could only be sent out but not replied to and each response required a new message to be created without a connection to the previous one. Forcing users to use alternate platforms, leading to low engagement and resistance of school districts to adopt.

Brightwheel on 'Shark Tank'

I used a task-based research approach and turned to parents and educators to help identify pain points in the messaging experience.

"Try to complete tasks within the brightwheel system":
1: Send A Message
2: Reply To A Message
3: Find Old Messages & Responses

Research: Parent interview

Research: Brightwheel user permission tree

I conducted an audit of the Brightwheel app and compared it to industry standards and best-in-class features expected by users.

Competitive Analysis

Problem: How do you overcome not having access to actual users of the platform?

Answer: Get Scrappy.

We were told we’d have access to brightwheel users, educators & school administrators. Unfortunately, we learned that wouldn't be possible. So we relied on our own network to find parents and educators to survey and interview.

I conducted two surveys, inviting 19 participants to take part. I was looking for specific qualitative and quantitative data regarding the context of why messages are sent: Under what topics & circumstances were they messaging? What methods did they trust the most & why?

We followed up with in-depth remote interviews of 2 Early Childhood Educators. One was a School Administrator responsible for 6 Campuses in the SF Bay Area. These interviews were key influencers on our solution.

During a stakeholder meeting we presented our findings:
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●Educators often communicated with groups of 10-12 & worried that the message system could undermine their ability to communicate clearly.

● 20% of Educators were worried their messages never made it to their intended audience.

● All users were unable to reply directly to messages, they had to create entirely new messages to respond and parents needed clear transparency to whom they were messaging.

● Educators use communication platforms 400% more than Parents, Teachers communicate with parents at least once a day (Teachers with teachers at least twice a day) with two points of contacts to engage with for every child.

● 30% of Parents communicate with teachers off of school communication platforms for school business.

Brightwheel affinity diagram

Brightwheel users were not confident messages were relayed due to lack of system transparency and accountability, causing users to exit and use alternate methods of communication.

‍How might we improve Brightwheel’s messaging responsiveness so that it builds trust & accountability, increasing daily usage and lowering user churn while improving platform adoption?

Must have core design values for our solution:
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Transparency: Make clear who messages are being sent to and coming from.
Accountability: Build confidence to users that messages are being received and read.
Responsiveness: The system needs to inform the user that an action was taken.

I developed a ‘Bake Sale’ scenario that could fit into our users journey, allowing us to separate all of the features an Educator would need to organize a school event.

Tasks for our Bake Sale paper prototype test included:
1: Start a Group
2: Name the Group
3: Message the group
4: Reply to a message
5: Remove a Participant from a Group
6: Archive the Group
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All users were successful completing this flow in our initial user tests, feedback included making changes to settings icons and avatars.

Scenario workshop

Sketching & Dot voting

Whiteboard wireflow

Task based user test, task list

With stakeholder approval, we used Sketch and Invision to refine our sketches into digital wireframes and after another user test asking users to complete our scenario, we found some key takeaways:
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● Naming groups was not apparent.

● Read receipts weren’t entirely clear

● Asset spacing, there was a risk of a ‘fat finger’ error when tapping buttons.

User test, paper prototype

Mid fidelity wireframe

Annotated wireframes

User testing

As fidelity increased, users felt comfortable enough to use familiar mobile iOS gestures within our solution, we suggested these next steps to be included in future iterations.

Upon stakeholder approval, we refined our user-tested prototype, created and applied UI inline with brightwheel’s branding, resulting in a 90% success rate for all user-tested tasks.

Brightwheel prototype demo

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