Making Social Emotional Learning desirable
School of Wonder provides minimal and practical tools for Social Emotional Learning to educators.
The Problem
With the rise of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) initiatives throughout the education system, educators feel overwhelmed with the time and work involved in teaching this content, due to lack of time and/or funds. There are hours of training involved and too much content in the program to become acquainted with.
Our Solution
What educators need is not another program. They just need a tool.
We redesigned School of Wonder’s curriculum with an emphasis on how minimal the time investment is. The products will be simple tools to aid the educator within their existing curriculum as opposed to entire lessons to implement.
The activities are short and sweet, and virtually led by School of Wonder experts. Educators simply become participants rather than facilitators.
My Role
I got to be a part of ideating and collaborating with the product team in addition to all my UX roles. It helped me gain a more comprehensive understanding of School of Wonder’s goals and vision.
Of course, I was in charge of the UX processes as well, including interviews, competitive analyses and wireframes.
Design Process
Competitive Analysis
Research Insights
We targeted and interviewed educators. These were public and private school teachers, home schooling parents, alternative program educators, afterschool directors and camp leaders. We wanted to address:
Major pain points when implementing an external program into an existing curriculum
What educators really want and need from a Social-Emotional Learning program
What they like from SEL programs they’ve experienced in the past
We began the interviews expecting to hear positive outlooks toward Social Emotional Learning. We actually discovered that for such an essential initiative, many educators had surprisingly indifferent attitudes toward it. Upon delving deeper, we learned that:
Adding another curriculum into their already busy workload was not readily welcomed.
Even if they found time to look through the program, there was too much training and content that they found it overwhelming.
We also found that alternative educators had different pain points altogether.
They did not have access to sufficient SEL resources due to the lack of funds and lack of knowledge.
Ideating
It took a team to define the user problem.
We then aligned the user problem with our business goals, which is to develop a product that sets itself apart from other SEL programs in the industry by being usable and effective.
Personas
User Journey
No matter how much sweat and tears we pour into a project, a customer’s life doesn’t revolve around it. So what do their lives look like outside of the few minutes they spend on our platform?
Overall, School of Wonder’s SEL program fulfilled the essential needs of the educators.
Their biggest concerns included making sure the activities required little to no prep time in addition to being able to engage the students.
We thought the repetitive nature of the activities might be a negative but it ended up working out for the teachers involved.
The Solution
These are some concepts we incorporated into our designs to help relieve users’ feelings of being overwhelmed.
Emphasize the minimal time investment in implementing School of Wonder’s tools.
Keep the content of the website simple and straightforward to reduce frustration during exploration of the website.
Provide samples of the content to give users some security about what they’re choosing
Break curriculum into smaller, more affordable parts so the content is more digestible. Also, users won’t feel like they’re making some kind of huge commitment or buying into a ‘program.’
Include an extensive FAQ section to provide utmost support.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Starting out with mobile sketches really grounds the structure for me.
I stacked the curriculum cards to maximize the readability for small screen sizes.
Incorporated flowy lines between sections to communicate a sense of fun and adventure.
High-Fidelity Designs
A clear and straightforward message that outlines what makes School of Wonder’s program different from others.
Based on our research, these are the three points that users would find most valuable in an external Social-Emotional Learning program.
Having been a teacher myself, and from our research findings, there is nothing more valuable than time for our users. This is our way of empathizing, and offering a solution that is best not only for their work, but for them.
To help users make an informed decision about School of Wonder, we made sure to display samples of our content.
We specifically chose to call our products “tools” as opposed to a program because tools feels more like something users can easily integrate into an existing curriculum and schedule.
The program is divided into these chapters that users can purchase separately so that they don’t feel like they are heavily committing to anything.
FAQs was added to promote a sense of safety when users are trying to make their decision about their purchase. They deserve to know everything.
Usability Testing
I interviewed 6 educators for usability tests. Some of the most insightful feedback were:
They wanted more question options for the FAQ section.
They thought showing off more features of the program would help them with the decision making process.
Illustrations
All illustrations on the High fidelity designs were created by me, as well as the illustrations on the products pdfs themselves.
Future Impact
We hope School of Wonder will be able to provide educators with the simplicity that is essential within the hectic school day.
We anticipate a steady volume of sales not only because the content is easy and desirable, but because the affordable prices will encourage users to explore further purchases. The affordability will also attract alternative educators in addition to traditional teachers and Social-Emotional curriculum will be available to all settings.