Clarifi is a desktop app that helps middle- and high-school students with ADHD focus better on academic work by helping them build effective study habits and providing them with a distraction-free digital environment.
By designing a parent-facing portal for Clarifi, our goal is to help parents better support children with ADHD in building effective study habits and improving academic performance.
My Role
UX Design, User Research
TIMeline
Sep - Dec 2021 (4 months)
Team
• 1 Project lead
• 3 developers
Tools
Figma, React, Redux
How can Clarifi help parents of children with ADHD better support their child's learning journey?
Educators and parents are an integral part of a student’s learning and growth, and their support can be especially impactful for teens with ADHD. To provide a more effective homework tool, Clarifi is looking for a way to involve educators and parents in the student’s learning journey on the app. While defining project specs with developers, we decided to focus on the parent side of the application.
• Define parent's needs
• Brainstorm features and draw wireframes to explore different solutions
• Conduct user interviews
• Refine designs based off of insights from educators and parents of students with ADHD
• Make revisions to earlier brainstorms based on research insights and team feedback
• Create high-fidelity wireframes
• Develop the final design for the parent-facing assignment page for beta testing
Method
45 min
virtual
interviews
4
educators &
parents
Goal
1. Define the purpose of the parent portal
2. Gain a better understanding of features that will help parents support their child’s academic success
Key Questions
• Do parents and educators face additional challenges when working with teens with ADHD? If so, what do they currently do to face these challenges?
• What do parents and educators need to support their children/students?
• What helps parents, teachers, and students work well together? What hinders them from working well together?
• Frustrated because they feel that some parents aren't invested
• Struggle with the need to communicate frequently with parents to give updates on students' progress
"I've had to hound parents to sign permission slips or find tutoring"
• At times feel stressed by the need to take care of a distracted teen because they have trouble staying on task
• Want motivations/incentives to be more involved in their children's education
• Need a plan and a goal
"What can I do as a parent?"
• Send in app XP points to student when they complete an achievement
• Send reminders before a student misses a study session
➤ Encourages parent to be more involved
• Students complete streaks with consecutive days of studying
• Show streak progress
• Parents can set new goals for students
➤ Motivates parents to work together with child
• Parents see study recommendations on the home tab based off of student's study activity
• Parents can schedule study sessions accordingly
(Not feasible for timeline)
• Schedule meetings directly with educators
• View upcoming meetings
(Not feasible for timeline)
• View focus minutes, sessions completed, and other statistics on study activity
• View completed assignments
➤ Reduces need for constant updates between parents and educators
As a team, we talked about the ways we could integrate reinforcement and gamification to help parents become more involved in their children's learning journeys.
We came up with the idea of a star system in which parents will be asked to assign a star to prioritize an assignment. Once the parent has done this, they will progress in their streak and be able to earn more bonus points for the student.
As part of our idea to give parents an overview of what their child was working on at school, we decided to flesh out the assignments page more and integrate it with the star system.
Below, I sketched a few different layouts the assignments page could take. The key challenge here was finding a way to effectively display completed, in progress, and missing assignments and continuing to give parents action items to complete.
Some of the main revisions we made were displaying missing assignments in red to condense the number of categories we needed and indicate information more concisely and adding a tab where parents would be able to view recent activity.
(Version 1)
(Version 2)
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Since this was the first time I worked on a UI/UX design project for a client, I think I learned a lot from this experience. Here are a couple of my key takeaways:
• Talk to developers early to learn about technical constraints within the timeline and scope of the project. (For example, we determined that the study recommendations idea would not be feasible within our timeline.)
• There's a limit to how much a design can grow when it's limited to one individual - sharing designs frequently and brainstorming with the team leads to better ideas and valuable feedback
Though we likely could have streamlined the design process better, working on a project for Clarifi allowed me to realize and embrace the messy, nonlinear nature of the design process.
Through all the revisions, user interviews, and back-and-forth between brainstorming, wireframes, and mockups, I learned that it was important to think more broadly during the ideation process, avoid being tied to a single idea, and present multiple designs in low-fi.
Thank you for viewing!
And thanks to Bryan, Andrew, Anna, Kevin, and Elyssa for being a great team! :)