For the final project as part of the Ironhack UX/UI boot camp, we we partnered with real businesses. The entire class was presented with a number of options, and the groups sorted out who would pair with which business. Our groups chose to work with an American business called Class Equity.
I felt confident going in that we would come up with a strong proposal for the stakeholders, as I felt we had a strong team. My team members were Nikkolette from Ukraine, who has several years working in a start up under her belt, and Anna from Germany, who has a background in Mechanical Engineering. And naturally myself, with my background as a Historian. Additionally, I am luck enough to have been raised in a family with several teachers, so I was able to bring in some insights from that into our project.
The Client
Class Equity is, at its’ core, an educational web app. At this time, the business has one product, which is an online platform which makes it easy for teachers to implement what is know as a “classroom economy” with greater ease than has been possible in the past. If one has never heard of such as thing, I will explain shortly.
Firstly, however, let's meet the founders. Abby Coyle and Katie Gracey are middle school math teachers from South Carolina. Together, they launched Class Equity in August of 2021 with the following goal:
"Our goal is to make the classroom economy system as easy and seamless as possible for teachers to incorporate into their weekly routine. We truly believe in the power of the system to not only create a positive learning environment but to teach students how to be financially responsible. With ClassEquity, we aim to increase economic mobility by giving all students the tools they need to become financially independent, regardless of their zip code."
-Abby & Katie
In essence, a classroom economy is a combination of teaching methods and classroom management strategies. Students have “jobs” and earn “money” to buy things with a classroom store. Items like pens, markers, stickers, or whatever the teacher chooses. This gives the teacher a powerful method to teach students about how to manage their finances, while also introducing an easy to use reward-punishment system. However, in the past teachers had to create the “money” themselves out of paper, invent jobs, and keep track of everything all by hand. With Class Equity, it is all managed easily in the web app.
The Challenge
Class Equity had worked with a previous Ironhack UX/UI team earlier in the year, so the app already had a significantly better user experience than it had previously. However, given the short time frame of these projects, the previous team had only addressed the teacher side of the app. So the student side still had quite a few problems and lacked the depth of functionality.
So after meeting with stakeholders via video call, as they were in South Carolina and we were in Berlin, we all agreed that our team would focus on the student side. Amongst ourselves, our team decided to focus primarily on data architecture, the site map, and features. The previous team had suggested branding changes as well, but we felt that we would not have time to adequately address this within our time frame.
The Research Begins: Transatlantic Testing
Now it was time to really get down to business. Where to start? Of course with research!
One challenge was immediately apparent. We were in Berlin, Germany and our target audience was on the other side of the Atlantic. While Class Equity already has over 10,000 student and teacher users, the company only operates in the United States. This made it a challenge to conduct usability testing and interviews. But, as the old adage goes, “where there is a will, there is a way.”
With the discussion around the lack of adequate financial education in the United States coming more into public discourse in the last decade or so, it made sense to begin with an exploration of the topic through secondary research. Having the most experience with this out of the three of us, I took the lead here. First I looked into scholarly sources, such as “The Effectiveness of Youth Financial Education: A Review of the Literature” by Martha Henn McCormick and “Financial education in schools: A meta-analysis of experimental studies” by Tim Kaiser and Lukas Menkhoff. Then, I looked into the public discourse on the subject in news articles.
Some of the key findings included:
Financial education during childhood can be imperative for success later in life.
Children begin learning financial habits from an early age, mostly from family.
Financial habits learned in childhood strongly predict behavior in adulthood.
States are increasingly requiring financial literacy to be taught in schools.
Teachers lack the tools and curriculum to teach financial literacy effectively.
Many teachers also feel they lack expertise in the subject.
From this, we concluded that our Class Equity was addressing a real world problem. This product is more than a “nice to have,” it is a “need.” With tools like this, teachers can help set their students up to be more financially successful decades after they leave the classroom.
The Market
With this in mind, we conducted a market analysis to see what other solutions existed in the market.
Through this, we found that other gamified solutions existed, nothing was too similar to our product. Class Equity was also unique in its ability to also function as a classroom management system.
Interviews and Testing
As I have mentioned, our ability to access actual users was limited. Fortunately, the Class Equity team was able to provide us with extensive documentation on user research they had already conducted. This included dozens of interviews, and an even greater number of survey results from the last year. While this gave us valuable insights, we could not trust entirely in research we did not conduct ourselves.
Luckily, we were able to speak with a teacher user of the platform via video call. Given the unique relationship between teachers and students, they were able to give us valuable insight into the student’s pain points.
Further, we were able to conduct user testing with a young student, with parental supervision. Our teacher walked the student through the sign in process, as they did with their students in a classroom setting. The teacher was on a video call, and the student was using an iPad on our side. The student was directed to apply for a job, deposit money in their account, and buy an item from the classroom shop.
From this we identified a number of paint points, including but not limited to:
Students can not find the store, in spite of it being their main point of interest
The Cart does not have a fixed position
Only one type of item could be in the cart at a time
There is a lack of feedback
The site is not responsive, and does not function properly on smaller scenes
Students lack motivation, as the student portal has few features
User Persona
With this research, we created a user persona to represent our student users.
A key decision we made during this phase was to focus on the age group of 10 to 15-year-olds. Class Equity currently targets children of all ages, but we realized it would be more effective to target a more specific age group. The differences in abilities and interests of a 5-year-old versus a 16-year-old are too large for us to address on this platform at this stage. Our research and interviews led us to the conclusion it would be best to focus primarily on middle school students.
With this, we created an empathy map to better understand our users. We found it a greater challenge to relate to child users than we had with adult users, who had been the focus of our previous projects.
Site Map and Ideation
Next, we mapped the student side of the app as it existed then. We noted pain points and possible improvements on the map, to make it visually apparent where the changes needed to be implemented.
After several ideations, on features and ways to improve the system, we added these notes to our site map.
The Design, and further ideation
We began with Lo-Fi sketches of our new design.
Unfortunately, at this point in time Anna suffered some family emergencies and a case of COVID. Which meant she was unable to join us for most of the remainder of the project. Nevertheless, Nikkolette and I pressed on.
We each created several versions of each screen separately, and then came together to choose some of the best options. For scenes we were not certain about, we asked our colleagues in the class to choose which they thought would be the most suitable. It is always good to get an outside perspective, especially when you are working in such a small team.
After choosing which low-fi frames to use as our templates, we moved on to mid-fi. Due to the short time frame, we did not have time to conduct user testing at this stage.
Some of the changes we decided on were the following:
Add a notification feature to the home page
Separate “transaction history” and “pending transaction” into separate tabs with the “activities” page
Adding more content to the student profile and allowing avatar customization
Divide the signup process into several pages, to give more of a sense of the process
Add feedback at more points throughout the app.
The biggest change we made was the addition of “goals” and a new “budget” page. “Goals” allows students to create separate accounts within their profile to save for certain items or experiences within the class store. For example, “buying” their desk (some teachers collect “rent” for the desk as part of the classroom economy.”
The Budget page was an entirely new feature we added. On this page, students see how much they are spending on “needs,” “wants,” and “savings.” We decided to represent the values both numerically and graphically. A budget overview also appears on the student’s dashboard. We validated this idea with both our client and the teacher we interviewed, who saw it as a potentially valuable teaching aid.
With the basic design down, we created our mood board and style guide.
The Hi-Fi
Finally, we were ready to create our hi-fi prototype. Here are some examples of pages we created in static form compared to the past website.
Going Forward
We plan to meet with our client to assist with the implementation of the features they chose to incorporate. I would love to work with them in the future because I think their company has a genuinely great mission. Teachers are generally passionate about what they do, because one certainly does not go into that profession for the money. And these teachers, Katie and Abby, are helping other teachers help their students. Furthermore, financial literacy is a subject that is seriously lacking in many schools. Proper education in the field starting in childhood could make a tremendous difference in the futures of thousands of students. This is a positive social good that could have impacts for decades to come. And not be overly dramatic, but the effects of generational wealth can hardly be understated in problems of inequity in the United States. Of course one web app can not address such massive social problems, I feel certain it will make a difference in the lives of some students in the long run, even if they do not realize it. And that is enough of a reason for me to put my time and energy into this project further, if I can.