Living Room Tutors

Where students become teachers.

Role: UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher

Methods: Content Inventory & Audit, Secondary Research, Stakeholder Walkthrough, Personas, Touchpoint Journey Map, Concept Mapping, User Scenarios, Storyboarding, UX Strategy, Client Video

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Excalidraw, Google Sheets, Zoom

Client: Living Room Tutors is a Minnesota-based non-profit. They are supporting communities in their efforts to mitigate the impact of school closures by facilitating the connections between volunteer student mentors and students who need support. They are a free web-based service that offers resources for students, families, and educators to improve the learning experience of K-12 Students. They seek to help students who have had their education suddenly interrupted and keep their academic achievement trajectories strong.

The Problem

How can we improve Living Room Tutor’s UX strategy to create a more secure and supportive environment for tutors and tutees, streamline outreach efforts, and track student progress to increase Living Room Tutor’s enrollment, engagement, and learning outcomes?

The Secondary Research

To gain a better understanding of Living Room Tutors’ opportunity areas, my team and I strategically divvied up research work. We looked for answers within the competitive landscape, in existing documentation, and in secondary research. I focused on creating a competitive analysis, looking into other free, peer-to-peer tutoring sites, as well as other popular low-cost tutoring sites.

I added my findings to a FigJam board where my team and I collected raw data. We then synthesized our findings through affinity diagramming. These findings allowed us to idenitfy key opportunity areas, site users, goals, and approaches.

We found Living Room Tutors could benefit most from focusing on areas like outreach, tutor training/support, feedback documentation, and prioritizing tutee safety. We used the information gathered to inform our interview with the stakeholder. And after gathering all information finalized our guiding strategy statement:

All user experience touchpoints for Living Room Tutors will help tutees and tutors to feel secure and/or supported and confident so that they are able to learn/practice new material and/or skills. We will do this by focusing on creating a safe and reliable space through streamlined outreach and continuous training processes. As a result we hope to see improved tutor and tutee engagement and academic performance, as measured by increased enrollment numbers and self-rated improvement scores.

The Touchpoint Strategy Map

After finalizing our strategy statements, we identified all user touchpoints throughout a user’s ideal future-state experience with Living Room Tutors. We focused on two users: Tutor and Guardian of the Tutee, and created personas for each. We broke down 4 primary phases of the user’s journey:

  1. Discovery

  2. On-boarding

  3. Tutoring

  4. Turnover

Within these 4 phases we identified each digital and physical touchpoint including: in person & social media outreach efforts, email communication throughout placement and scheduling, and remote tutor sessions using video platform of choice.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Using the information gathered through our secondary research and competitive analysis, stakeholder meeting, and touchpoint mapping, it was time to start wireframing. We divided work by workload and each mocked up low-fidelity wireframes based on our focus areas. I designed the onboarding flow and profile page using Excalidraw.

I also created mock email surveys based on LRT’s current end-of-year survey. Their future surveys would be sent before starting the program to gauge expectations, a short check-in after every session to track progress throughout, and at the end of the tutor/tutee relationship to gather constructive feedback.

The Touchpoint Wireferames

After discussing our low-fidelity wireframes with our team, and benefitting from a senior UX professionals critique, we finalized our touchpoints and strategy. We moved on to create high-fidelity annotated wireframes for our features. These are to be passed along to the client as a way to easily guide them through our strategy and point to exact goals and reasoning for each decision our team made. I provided wireframes for: 1. Profile, 2. Onboarding Survey, 3. Tutor Check-in Survey and 4. Exit Survey. Examples below:

The Storyboarding

The Video

Our final client deliverable was a video accompanied by our annotated wireframes and any other additional materials that could help LRT implement our solutions. For the video, we wanted to tell a story following the journey of both tutor and tutee through their experience with Living Room Tutors, as well as give them a vision into the future with possible next steps. This was a collaborative effort; I created many of the visuals using the Figma plugin Blush, my teammate Kendall Van Horne did the video editing, Rose Weselmann narrated, and Anne Kaune pulled together our client deliverable package.