Bringing the spirit of the school alive
Accurately represent who they are as a community to inspire families to join the cooperative and support the membership's team workflow
Prospective parents who have never heard of the school and exploring the website on their computer
Stakeholder Interviews • User Interviews • Affinity Mapping • Card Sorting • Ethnographic Research • Design Studio • Usability Testing
Project Manager | UX/UI Designer
4 UX/UI Designers
The Children’s Cottage Cooperative is a play-based preschool located in Larkspur, CA that was established in 1949. The school is where smiles, laughter, kindness, & engagement are abundant.
The teachers and families of the school are creative, compassionate & a conscious community. As a co-op, the school requires that they have as close to full capacity in order to ensure the school is operating.
Simplified the information architecture • Call to action button to start the application process • Integrate Calendly to let parents schedule their tour online
Share the school's rich history • Get to know the teachers
Clearly explain what a co-op preschool is and what is expected from parents • Visually represent the school and show parents what a day at the school looks like
Visually communicate the programs offered and the prices associated with them
These 2 pages did not exist in the original website • List events happening for current and prospective families • Explain the application process and allow parents to download the application
Although our project was to deliver a redesigned site, we took the extra step to provide them a content strategy and style guide to assist them in implementing and maintaining their site.
This was particularly important as the parent managing the site would change regularly and this would assist them in keeping the site consistent.
Click to see the full content strategy and style guide
• Top 3 items parents look for online are Curriculum/Educational Philosophy, Cost, and Enrollment
• If parents had a magic wand, the top 3 items they want to see are Teacher/Staff Bios, Pictures and Videos, and Online Enrollment
• 88.6% of respondents were mothers
• 51.4% were interested in co-op schools
• All respondents were from nuclear families
• The application process has 8 steps
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I used the data from our research and our client's target audience to construct how a prospective parent might find the school, discover what they are about, and the application process. Through this, we were able to confirm the major pain point that needed to be tackled.
We interacted with the children, teachers, and parents and got to really immerse ourselves into that atmosphere. This also gave us a chance to take photos that would be used in the redesign.
As one of their goals was to accurately represent who they are as a community to the public through their website, I asked some of the current parents to describe what the school meant in one word and I brought the team to the school to conduct ethnographic research.
Based off of our research data and taking into consideration the business' needs, we card sorted to come up with the new site map.
Resulting in this:
The new site map is easier to navigate and number of pages has been reduced; but it still contains all of the information that the parents are looking for and the information the school would like to portray.
I led the team through a Design Studio to quickly generate ideas on the layout and content of the landing screen.
From this, we got the basic layout and determined what our header and footer would look like.
I took on designing the Preschool, Summer Camp, Programs overview, and the Apply pages.
Knowing that it is always easier to expand to a bigger screen, I had the team design mobile first.
I compiled all of the screens onto one document so that we could look at it as a whole and to see where we wanted to go.
As a team, we made decisions on the layout that we would all adhere to and A/B tested any elements we could not come to an agreement with.
Once we agreed on a layout, we proceeded to expand the design to desktop. I took our screens and wired them up in InVision to begin our usability tests.
• Changed the main hero image on landing page
• Removed the call to action from header to body
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Changed:
• “Support” to “Donate”
• “Enroll” to “Apply”
• Standardized formatting for spacing, fonts, and colors
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• Redesigned the co-op parent obligation to clear confusion
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• Clarified which elements were clickable by utilizing colors
• Reduced and clarified the copy
As someone who loves working with children and the environment it offers, this project was one that was really close to my heart.
If I had more time, I would have loved to speak with more parents and do deeper dive into market research.
I am proud of my team and thankful they allowed me to be their project manager - they helped me grow in so many ways both as a leader and a designer.
• Build out the 'Parent Portal' page - integrating their new system Jovial
• Eventually move the application process completely online
• Conduct more usability testing to ensure that the content strategy is as effective as we hoped it would be