About GrantMe
GrantMe is an education consulting company for high school students. Its main goals are to help students get into their desired universities, and obtain scholarships and funding opportunities to use toward their post-secondary education. Their services focus on consulting, mentorship, and writing support, all of which are supported by their online platform.
Note: GrantMe's consulting and online platform are paid services. I have been asked to refrain from disclosing details about their offerings. Therefore, I will provide limited product information and mockups.
Team
1 UX Designer (me)
3 Full-stack Developers
1 Product Manager
My Role
User Research
UI Design
UX Design
Usability Testing
The Challenge
GrantMe was not satisfied with their existing tools for driving student engagement and productivity. The product manager requested the team to create a new task management feature tailored to our students. He believed it would help students break down tasks into smaller, more manageable actions and improve their organization. This, in turn, would result in more engaged and productive students.
Validating The Need
To gain a deeper understanding of the necessity and benefits of a task management feature, we first interviewed our current students to see how they kept track of their tasks. We found that:
There was a wide range of approaches, from keeping track mentally to making to-do lists.
Higher-performing students tended to be more organized and created to-do lists.
The lists were manual, often in a calendar or planner.
It was clear that a task management tool could help students become more organized, and thereby perform better. Furthermore, it would be more convenient than writing on paper.
We then interviewed our consultants to gather their insights on pushing students for higher engagement and productivity, as well as their opinion on the proposed feature. Here's what we discovered:
The consultants believed that most students are capable of reaching their goals if they became more engaged. And a task management tool could enable our students to engage with tools and services more frequently.
They felt the tool would allow them to easily show the students, with real examples, how to organize their tasks. And they would also gain more visibility on the students’ progress.
With our consultants supporting the feature as well, we were confident that a task management feature would be valuable, and set out to create it.
Formulating The Content
Before we began to build the content, we met with the development team. In order to attain feasibility and effectiveness, we established the following requirements:
The onboarding should teach all users without having different variations.
It needed to be as succinct as possible to not obstruct the meetings.
To achieve these goals, we figured that we needed to organize the onboarding from the simplest to the most advanced features, and provide exit points so that the users could stop when they obtained the information they needed, and join the meeting. Thus, we organized the onboarding information into 4 sections in the following order:
Navigation
Interaction
Customize the room
Host a meeting
The learning centre would have the corresponding articles to the sections.
Creating The Functions
Since it was a new feature, we had to first figure out what functions we needed. We brainstormed with our consultants and developers to balance benefits and feasibility, and we finalized on the following main functions:
Students could create or delete tasks.
A task contained a title, description, due date, and priority.
Tasks could be marked as incomplete or completed.
Students could group their tasks.
The Design
A list view showed an overview of tasks, including due dates and priority. And the tasks were sorted into sections.
Students could click on a task to see its details, which contained a title, due date, priority, section, description, and whether it’s completed or incomplete.
Validate The Design
Before implementing the feature, we validated the design in the following ways:
We gathered feedback internally from various teams
We interviewed students and presented the idea
We received positive feedback overall. Although most students hadn't used a similar tool before, they liked the idea and were eager to try it. Our team, on the other hand, was confident in its potential impact, especially given our experience with other task management tools in the industry.
The Results
The team reported an 8.66% increase in weekly active users after the feature was released.
In a survey, 68.4% of students said they would use it weekly, and 42.1% said they would use it every other day.
Consultants provided positive feedback, highlighting how the feature helped them support students in staying on track.
Future Iterations
We had ideas to incorporate our services and tools into the feature to tailor it more to our students' needs. Specifically, wanted to automate:
Application deadlines
Recommended preparation times
Links to relevant resources we had
Recommended task breakdown
We believed these additional functions would make the feature even more impactful. Although they didn't make it to the first version due to technical and time constraints, we planned to incorporate them in future iterations.
Key Learnings
We didn't always have the opportunity to test the designs with a working prototype. While this was not ideal, we learned to compensate by effectively explaining the ideas during interviews, drawing insights from other data, and nailing down user personas to conduct cognitive walkthroughs.