Living Room Tutors

Multi Touchpoint Strategy

Client

Living Room Tutors (LRT) is a Minnesota-based platform that was borne out of a need experienced firsthand by its founder, Jinglin Li. In March 2020, she was sitting at home tutoring her younger siblings as COVID halted in-person learning and upended schooling as we knew it. As a high school junior, Jinglin realized that this situation was present at a much larger scale than just her home: all around the world, the youth were experiencing similar situations.

Challenge

LRT was looking for help in visioning a user-focused design strategy that supports their current and future organizational goals and improves the tutor/tutee experience.

Specifically:

• Increase outreach efforts to tutors and tutors

• Simplify and clarify program expectations and process

• Optimize tutor/tutee matching efforts

Guiding Strategy Statement

All user experience touchpoints for Living Room Tutors will help tutors to feel supported and empowered so they are able to effectively teach. We will do this by focusing on standardization and communication. As a result, we hope to see an increase in user feedback and involvement.

Know, Don’t Know, Assume

First, we reviewed all the materials given to us by Living Room Tutors. These materials included a background of how LRT got started and what they do, survey results (from parents, tutors, and tutees), marketing/outreach material, and a link to their new website they hadn’t launched yet. 

With that information, along with knowing what LRT was looking to gain as far as their goals with this project, we conducted a Know, Don’t Know, and Assume activity. These items were then put into categories under each theme. This helped us organize our data so we could be prepared for the stakeholder meeting with the right questions!

Stakeholder Interview

Then we met with Zoe Chen who is the operations manager for LRT. Zoe does all of the matching of tutors and tutees, answers email inquiries, grant writing, designed the new LRT website, and she also tutors!

During the interview, Zoe gave us so much insight and answered all of our questions pertaining to the organization itself, the process of LRT’s services, their users (tutor, tutees, and parents), and their funding/donation sector. 

Deep Dive

After gathering a bundle of knowledge from Zoe, my team members and I individually completed a deep dive. I specifically focused on researching other competitor platforms and learned as much as possible about how competitors operated within this space, especially as a non-profit. I was trying to figure out what worked for these other companies that LRT could implement and provide for their community.

I noticed four main patterns amongst competitors that could be opportunity areas for LRT:
1. Including safety measures
2. Implementing a donation page
3. Sharing of statistics
4. Mission, Values, & Goals of the company

I also put together a list of differentiators that set aside one platform from the next.  

Synthesis

Then we came together as a team (5 of us total) and shared what we each found and had a discussion on what area we wanted to focus on as a team. We decided to focus on the tutor’s experience. Given the insight Zoe shared, the surveys from tutors, and a deep dive into other aspects of the entire program, creating a strategy to curate a positive experience for the tutor made sense. If the tutor feels supported with the proper resources to effectively teach, the tutee is more likely to feel supported and gain academic progression! 

Journey Map

A Journey map was created to show the path of the current user as well as what they could experience in their future state.

Low Fidelity Sketches

We each individually focused on an area to create low-fidelity sketches.

My focus areas were Outreach and Funding/Donation. Increasing outreach was a goal that LRT wanted for this project. I also created a couple wireframes for a new funding/donation page that would be embedded in the website. 

Prototyping

After our team came together and again discussed what we created, we narrowed our focus down a little bit more and focused heavily on the Discovery, Application, Onboarding, Tutoring, and Exit Process for the tutor. Below please find just a few examples what our team prototyped for this process.

Next Steps

1. Prioritize suggested features

2. Either conduct another Survey, Kano Analysis, or Usability Interview on those suggested features

3. Implement features where software developer isn’t necessary

4. Raise money by conducting a fundraiser mentioned in the appendix (LRT is a free resource and they continue to function that way, so funding will be essential)

5. Once funding is in hand, implement the rest of the features where a software developer is needed

6. After some time has been given for users to experience the new features, send out a survey and compare the outcome from previous surveys

Final Thoughts

It was a pleasure working with Living Room Tutors! My design group and myself were at awe with what Jinglin and her team put together, it’s truly inspiring. We all felt so grateful to have the opportunity to create a strategy that helps improve user experiences with LRT. It is incredible that the next generation of change-makers are enacting an altruistic mission to fill the gaps in their own educational systems. With people like this in the world, the future is bright!