Scope of web-app for backoffice:
Creation of school accounts, activating/de-activating teacher accounts, activity page for actions regarding teachers, schools & teacher profile page, booking overviews listing open & confirmed jobs
Minimum Viable Ecosystem
The issue:
In 2021 I got involved in an exiting new project for a startup company. With manually matching teachers with schools, to help schools with finding substitute teachers, they were already able to prove the business value of their concept. But mediating between two parties to make a match requires manpower. Shifting this matchmaking proces to a digital platform on which the two parties can find each other online, without the intervention of backoffice staff was perceived as the key to a profitable, more scalable business model. They were ready to scale-up.
The goal:
It was my job to design a platform that enables schools to book teachers online, so that a growth in the number of matches made each month could be established.
Collecting the Data:
I talked to the business owner and backoffice employees to gather the first basic product requirements. In a Design Sprint setting we plotted the current and the new -contextual- user journey, given we would move the matchmaking to an online version, and explored several different concepts in an ideation session. In this session the key decisions around the concept were made, we decided for example that multiple teachers should be able to apply for one and the same job, and that it would be up to the school to browse profiles and pick the right candidate. Also product types were determined for each user group as well as the scope of the MVP. A deliberate choice was for instance not to include the invoicing flow.
The concept:
Since I had recently introduced a brand new design system for another company under the same holding, which I decided I could reuse with only a few UI tweaks, I was able to rapidly design and prototype. In just a few weeks I had hi fidelity designs of an entire ecosystem. Using the existing Component Library would also dramatically decrease the time for the development team to build everything, that had to be developed from scratch otherwise.
Scope of the responsive web-app for teachers:
Creation of an account, filling in personal details & uploading documentation needed to evaluate & activate teacher, creating a profile of yourself for schools
Scope of the responsive web-app for schools:
Booking form, Booking overviews listing open & confirmed jobs, viewing profiles of teachers who applied, confirmation flow and generation of agreement, settings for contact & school details
Scope of the mobile app for teachers:
Receiving invitations for jobs and notifications about the job status, viewing job & school details, application flow for jobs
The feedback:
Equipped with several prototypes I turned to teachers, schools and backoffice to test and validate the usability of my designs. Honing & finetuning toward a final version.
Also after implementation and the launch of the platform I held another round of interviews with all 3 user groups. This provided valuable feedback for the next iteration, a collection of insights and pain points that would shape my recommendations to the product team. A practice I still hold on to today.
The basic platform I designed for this project is still the foundation of the company today. Throughout the years I used the concepts created here to build new features upon, allowing the platform to play an increasingly larger role every day.
