ASTRA ACADEMY
Astra Academy is a startup that aims to help schools deliver personalised education to every child. They try to achieve this by building digital tools that automate technical tasks for teachers, parents and school administrators so that precious time isn’t wasted and is better spent on taking care of the student’s educational needs
MY ROLE
TIMELINE
Research, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping, Product management
4 months
THE CHALLENGE
The education industry in India is one of the rare industries that hasn’t evolved enough even with the introduction of technology. I was tasked with the responsibility of creating and managing the production of three applications to help teachers, parents and school administrators such that it enables them to focus more on educating students and waste less time on performing certain technical tasks
FINAL DELIVERABLES
1. Discover/identify needs and neccesities across
the three user groups
2. Design applications to solve the problems that exist
while keeping the brand identity
3. Oversee development and build roadmaps/manage
the product
4. Create MVP to start enrolling potential investors
PROCESS
1. Discovery and Research
USER RESEARCH
Started with user interviews so that I could directly engage and extract as much information as possible from the three sets of target users, i.e, parents, school teachers and administrators. 10 users from each user group were interviewed and the recordings as well as findings were documented on notion due to the firm’s insistence. Below is one of the questionnaires that I prepared for the interviews.
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How I documented the findings in notion :
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Since the main aim was to get the MVP(Minimum viable product) out in the market as soon as possible(to drag in investors), competitor research was saved for a later stage, i.e, the roadmap creation stage which will be showcased after a few sections. This was also because of the lack of direct competitors since Astra’s goal/vision was different to that of well-established edtech industry leaders like TopprOS and Leadschool
2. Defining the problem statement
COLLATING THE PROBLEMS
Further research was done using secondary sources such as the internet and social media as well previously implemented research projects regarding problems faced by school students, teachers, parents as well as administrators. Important problem statements were then selected and pinned across the problem board
Main issues faced by teachers :
Attendance registration was a major headache because teachers had to mark attendance in the register and then re-enter it in excel
A large amount of time was wasted in correcting notebooks as well as waiting for students to take down notes
Personal life was affected due to large number of parents communicating through whatsapp and teachers had to reply to them out of courtesy
Main issues faced by parents :
Felt it was tough to reach out to school or teachers and book appointments
Didn’t know much about what their child was doing in the class/performing due to lack of communication between school and parents
Preferred to pay fee at school because they didn’t feel online transactions were secure
Main issues faced by school administrators :
Maintaining the financial accounts of the school especially when it comes to fees was found to be tricky and was time-consuming due to the need to cross-check
A lot of time was wasted in printing and distributing circulars as well calendars
Another thing that consumed time was data entry, which was required at all points including fee payment as well as student registration
USER FLOWS
After getting a deeper understanding of the problem, user flows were mapped out for each app to have a basic understanding of how the app would navigate and work. Below is the parent user flow(made on figma):
3. Solving the problem
MID-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Since we had to get the MVP out in the market as soon as possible, I skipped sketching and jumped into mid-fidelity wireframing. Mid-fidelity wireframing for the admin application was also skipped since the Admin MVP existed mostly to serve the parent and teacher applications. Below are some of the featured highlights of the teacher and parent mid-fidelity wireframes :
4.Visual design and UI
STYLE GUIDE
Since there was already a style guide for the brand established before I joined, I was instructed to use the same type and colours since they already pitched the project to several investors with the same guide. The login/sign-up screens were also made before I joined and it was something they wanted to stick with. Here’s a peek :
INTERACTION STUDY
Since a large part of the demographic in all three cases involved emerging users, the aim was to make the design as simple as possible and use colour contrast to make CTA’s stand out.
I then started to study how all three target groups performed some of the tasks in real life to shape the experience accordingly. This was done to ease the user into the experience and make sure they aren’t overwhelmed by the interface.
Below are some of the use cases which I studied :
HOW TEACHERS MARK ATTENDANCE DAILY
After talking to teachers(who I had previously interviewed), I found out that most teachers are used to marking attendance on a register by ticking the boxes of the students that are present, I tried to follow the same mechanism in the app by using checkboxes for marking students absent or present.
I also created an attendance count widget that floats while scrolling so that teachers can keep track of the total count.
The save button only appears after the teacher has scrolled to the end of the list, thereby reducing the chance of the teacher missing a student since she has to go through the list.
The final screen makes sure that the teacher can recheck the register before saving it.
HOW TEACHERS JOT DOWN EXAM MARKS
Similar to how attendance was taken, exam marks for each student are also recorded in a register line by line. I tried to replicate this experience by having marks entered in a student by student format.
The last screen ensured that if by any chance some students marks aren’t finalised, they can be entered later
HOW REPORT CARDS ARE VIEWED BY PARENTS
Report cards are usually viewed on a large piece of paper that was printed thereby making it tough to replicate the experience since the size of a user’s phone screen may hardly be 1/4th the size of the report card.
After talking to some of the parents, I found out that most of them(8/10) always preferred to read all exam marks for a subject at once. Hence I decided to use a dropdown to display marks subject-wise for each exam. Parents can switch between subjects and co-scholastic areas using the dropdown and subsequently see marks from different exams obtained by the student in that subject.
HI-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Since the MVP’s were the main priority, some of the features were kept aside for later releases and features pitched to initial investors were converted to high-fidelity designs.
Below are some of the highlights from the three MVP;s :
CIRCULARS/ANNOUNCEMENTS
Circulars/announcements can be broadcasted by the admin and it’ll appear in the circular section in both parent and teacher app
NO DATA SCREENS
Involved a bit of UX writing but made sure that screens with no data aren’t blank and that they lead to CTA’s so that users don’t have to wait or waste time
The following are some of the error screens in the teacher app/MVP
OTHER SMALL HIGHLIGHTS
Quick shortcuts in dashboards:
Fee payment: Offline fee payment can be easily registered by admin and fee can easily be paid online by parents on the app
Digital calendar: Admin can easily make a digital calendar by adding events, calendar will be displayed in teacher and parent apps
Admin can easily register existing students through excel sheet upload
PROTOTYPES
Made prototypes for the MVP's just incase the APK's weren't ready in time.
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P.S Try going fullscreen while viewing, elements may not be visible because the prototype was prepared in the lowest android screen size(360x640) and figma doesn't scale while embedding.
TEACHER MVP PROTOTYPE
Fullscreen button
PARENT MVP PROTOTYPE
Fullscreen button
ADMIN MVP PROTOTYPE
Fullscreen button
5.Product management
ROADMAPS
Created Roadmaps, user personas, feature maps and competitor analysis on a product management tool called AHA(since the firm insisted on it). Also completed an AHA course on Coursera to get an idea of how to work and was also guided by my mentor who was a product manager.
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DEVELOPMENT
Worked with two developers for the development of the parent and teacher MVP’s, constantly checked for bugs in each version and pushed APK’s out to investors. The admin MVP was developed by a third party separately on a contractual basis
INVESTOR ONBOARDING
Worked with the marketing team to make the pitch presentations and made a google form that enables parents to register to a school online so that the student is automatically added to the school’s Astra admin app.
St. Alphonsa school in Waluj, Aurangabad was the first school to enter Astra Academy🎉
7. Conclusion and next steps
This project allowed me to get a perfect feel of how the industry works and behaves and taught me a lot of things in the start up world as well as product management. Even with all this, I still think I could have done more especially when it comes to research. If I was given time, I would do a dairy study based on all three target groups as well as go work with them to find out what other things can be taken care of with the apps.
