Methodology Used
UX Design Strategy
Competitive Analysis
Stakeholder Interview
Touchpoint Strategy Mapping
User Journey Mapping
Personas
Low to Mid-fidelity sketch
Feature Concept Cards
High-fidelity wireframes
Annotated wireframes
Storyboard
Video and audio editing

Deliverables
Touchpoint Strategy Map
Touchpoint Prototypes

Tools
Figma
Excalidraw
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Google Sheets
Google Slides

To kick off the project, my team conducted an interview with one of the Operations Managers at LRT, Zoey Chen, to gain more familiarity with Living Room Tutors. Zoey provided a lot of context surrounding the structure of the organization, goals, visions, and primary values of LRT. She also identified a few focus areas for our design strategy, including:

• Increase outreach efforts

• Provide more resources and support for tutors and tutees (ie. training materials, expectations guidelines, etc.)

• Increase the number of tutors and tutees

• Mitigating online safety concerns

• Functionality to create accounts/profiles for tutors

• Implement a social media marketing strategy

Based on this context, I was able to conduct a deep dive into LRT’s materials and the peer tutoring landscape.

DEEP DIVE

Before jumping into the research for this project, my team and I created a Kanban board to keep track of work that needed to be done. Since this project involved a lot of moving pieces completed by different team members, this helped the team stay organized and guided us to look at what needed to be prioritized.

To complete the research in an efficient manner, my team and I agreed to divide and conquer the deep dive for LRT. Jamie focused on the website and locating the digital resources, forms, and emails. Amiee focused on the outreach process and registration. Stephen deep-dived into the project brief and surveys along with secondary research on the benefits of volunteering. My focus was on the competitive audit and secondary research on the benefits and challenges of peer tutoring. I gravitated towards the competitive audit because I love learning about programs that are currently in the market. This truly helps me in understanding the field that I am diving into so my team and I can design an effective strategy to help the client.

Competitive Analysis

In order to familiarize myself with virtual learning, I conducted a competitive audit, comparing Living Room Tutors to six similar tutoring platforms. 

Key findings from the audit included:

• There are several other free services, student-run peer tutoring organizations

• Most tutoring services provide scheduling assistance and profiles

• More developed tutoring services provide proper screening and vetting for tutors before assigning them to a tutee

• Many tutoring services provide online resources

• Some services provide a feature to submit feedback

• Some tutoring services provide a digital platform to conduct meetings through (ie. Zoom, Skype, etc.)

In addition to conducting the competitive audit, I also looked through the project brief, scanned through the website, and conducted secondary research on the benefits and challenges of peer tutoring and mentorship. 

Key findings from my secondary research include:

• Foster engagement and connection - A peer tutor is not just a tutor - they can be a friend, collaborator, mentor, role model, and more. Getting tutored by a peer who can relate to what you’re going through can offer the right motivation and accountability to reach your goals. This would be effective between tutor to tutees, and even tutors to tutors.

• Build confidence - Unlike a traditional classroom environment where the tutee might be one of many students in a room, peer-to-peer tutoring can offer a more relaxed, approachable space to find your voice, ask questions and build confidence.

• Reinforce learning for the tutors - Peer tutoring benefits not just the learner, but also a spectacular way to boost the tutor’s own learning journey. Research shows that teaching what you know to others is a strong way to internalize and apply what you’ve learned. 

• Peer-to-peer mentorship is effective. Studies show that peer-to-peer mentorship, in this case, tutor to tutor, can increase productivity. Tutors can help other tutors become better support for their tutees by gaining insights into different ways to provide support to tutees and techniques to be a more effective tutor.

Based on my findings from the competitive audit and secondary research, I was able to identify a couple of areas of opportunities within these various touchpoints. 

The few things that came up consistently:

• Enhance brand recognition through outreach, such as physical tabling at resource fair events, social media strategy, and marketing campaign.

• Implement consistent mandatory and interactive training module

• Strengthen tutor support by providing a resources page, and providing mentorship programs for tutors

• Improve usability by embedding various forms within the site

• Improve convenience by creating a profile feature and a way to schedule sessions online

• Improve online safety by requiring tutors to go through a proper screening process, such as physical or virtual interviews, uploading a copy of transcripts and/or student ID to verify their student status, and getting other tutors to sit in and  review a tutor’s session

With these findings, my team and I got together to synthesize our findings.

Research Synthesis

I created a FigJam board in Figma for my team. We each placed all of our findings from our individual deep dives into the board. We discussed our findings with one another and came up with the following opportunities to highlight our research:

• Improve support for tutors, such as training, resources, and mentorship

• Enhance outreach program

• Improve tutor scheduling and tracking platform

GUIDING STRATEGY

With these areas of opportunities defined, my team and I drafted the following guiding strategy statement:

Touchpoint Strategy Map

Based on the opportunity areas defined above, my team and I created a user journey map for a tutor going through the Living Room Tutor experience from the beginning to when the tutor starts connecting with a tutee. We chose to not focus on when the tutor exits because we decided that currently, the high priority for the organization is bringing in tutors and making sure they have all the necessary tools to succeed as a tutor. My teammate Stephen lead the creation of the persona and everyone collaborated on the details of the user journey experience. The journey map reflects the current experience of the tutor and the theoretically future experience of the tutor.

Mid-fidelity sketches

After creating the journey map, my team and I decided to split up the various touchpoint to create a sketch. We each took one major phase. I was in charge of the events page since I had done a bit more secondary research on peer tutoring and mentorship programs. From the research, I knew that designing this page would bring about more responsibilities for LRT, such as creating a program coordinator role because these events will need to be managed by LRT to monitor, approve, and schedule new programs or events. With this in mind, I decided to create a sketch with simple event ideas that could be managed by high school students. I created my sketches in Excalidraw. The types of events I included on the event page are:

• Tutor Mentorship program dedicated for tutors to meet other tutors through LRT and learn from one another so they can better support their tutees. 

• Living Room Tutor Tour program that allows LRT outreach reps to provide an introduction of LRT to new tutors and help them learn more about the organization and resources. 

• Outreach tabling events at resource fairs, churches, schools, or youth organizations. 

In consideration of the schedule of the student-led organization and student tutors, my sketch reflected a once or twice a month cadence for the various programs I listed above. Studies show that too many meetings are actually ineffective and unproductive, which was the reasoning behind the minimal events listed in the sketch. The actual frequency of the events will be up to LRT to decide what works best for the organization.

High-fidelity wireframes

Once my team and I had completed our sketches, we discussed what we should move forward with and if we should eliminate anything. We also consulted a few UX professionals for constructive critique and recommendations. They supported the ideas that my team and I came up with so we all moved forward with designing high-fidelity wireframes and added annotations. I put together a template for the annotated wireframes in Google Slides and had my team add each of their annotation to the deck.

Storyboard

The final deliverable for this project was a video that is meant to contextualize the design strategy. Since LRT is an organization made up of high school students, my team and I agreed that we should make something that was simple to follow rather than overly explanatory. We decided to frame the video around the story of a tutor and used icons and illustrations to depict our story.

My team and I used the user journey map to help guide our storyboard process. My teammate Stephen started the storyboard in Excalidraw and the rest of us contributed ideas to the storyboard as well. We then transferred the sketch into Figma where we created artboards and added illustrations to reflect the storyboard script. 

Video

I put together the final video using Adobe Premiere Pro. I was the only member of the team that had prior experiences with video editing programs through self-teaching so I took the lead on creating the video. While I worked on the video, I made sure everyone else on my team had something to work on. Stephen and Amiee lead the scriptwriting. Jamie provided support on background sound effects, assisted in the scriptwriting, and lead the recordings. 

The next step for LRT is to create a high-fidelity prototype of the recommended features and conduct think-aloud usability testing with primary user groups to inform future iterations. It will also be important to evaluate any implemented recommendations against client key performance indicators and redesign the strategy as needed.

CONCLUSION

Living Room Tutors is such an inspiring and amazing organization led by high school students. LRT recruited my team to help them develop a user-focused, multi-touchpoint strategy. After evaluating the competitive landscape and current user experience, several areas of opportunities were identified. The recommendations contained within the report are designed to improve LRT’s outreach efforts, tutor and tutee support, resources, and enhance the scheduling and tracking experience. By following the recommendations, I believe Living Room Tutors will see great improvement and confidence in tutor and tutee experiences.

Reflection

This project was a huge learning experience in many ways. First of all, strategy is so ambiguous, but the goal at the end of the day is to support the user and enhance their experiences. I also realized that UX strategy can closely overlap with marketing and business design strategy. Secondly, the joy and importance of a strong team are very important to pull through this project. I felt like my team worked really well together, but there were also areas of opportunity with communicating and delegating responsibilities more clearly. As always, I am super thankful for this experience.