Vault prep's Tutoring platform
Background + Research
The Project
I was approached by the Vault Prep team to design an MVP online platform that scaled their brick and mortar high school tutoring business by driving omnichannel efficiencies for tutors and laying the groundwork for a future student “school” that would enable flexible learning in exchange for course and college credits.
Due to my full-time employment, this project was tackled after-work during Spring 2020 and handed off to another designer in June 2020 with more bandwidth after investor interest prompted quicker timelines.
The CLIENT
Vault Prep is an LA-based, one-on-one tutoring company that serves an affluent community of parents and their high school students. Vault Prep touts a bread-and-butter tutoring strategy that successfully helps students maximize their academic performance by building strong problem solving skills, rather than overload students with content that requires memorization.
MVP
Budgets and timelines shifted throughout the project based on investor interest and the hiring of resources, but the original MVP of the platform was planned for August 2020 and had the main objective of solving operational pain points for their tutors. The first curriculum to go live was for “ACT Test Prep.”
My Role (Virtual)
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UX Strategy and Design, The Tutor Experience (Solo Designer): as the only designer on the team, I spearheaded UX strategy and user flows, as well as wireframes, low fidelity prototypes and medium fidelity mock-ups.
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Content Mapping: the Vault Prep team didn’t have curriculum documentation so throughout the project, I supported the team in cleaning up the curriculum for a digital context and defining how we’d measure progress and lesson mastery.
THE PROCESS
Research
Competitive Research, User Interviews and Personas, Problem Statements
Strategy
Platform Features, Content Mapping, Sitemap, User Flows, Mood Board
Design
Wireframes, Low Fidelity Prototype, User Testing, Medium Fidelity Mocks
Handoff
Prototype Testing, Documentation, Curriculum Clean Up
RESEARCH
Before digging into strategy and design, I familiarized myself on the “learning” market and interviewed key players at Vault Prep. This allowed me to solidify the main user pain points of Vault Prep tutors and start thinking about how to solve those issues.
Competitive Research
The online learning marketplace is extensive, however there are 3 relevant business models:
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Cheap, online platforms: open-source, digital libraries of content for self-directed learning. This format prioritizes accessibility + affordability but doesn’t cater to students that need extra coaching.
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One-on-One, In-Person Tutoring: one-on-one sessions between trained tutors and students, the most traditional format of tutoring. This prioritizes deeper learning for the student but is more expensive and less flexible.
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Online, Live Tutoring: virtual, one-on-one tutoring sessions in real-time. This sits between type #1 and type #2 with pricing being slightly more expensive than online learning platforms but less personalized than in-person sessions.
To help drive omnichannel efficiencies in the Vault Prep business, we’d need to create a product that enabled tutors to continue providing personalized tutoring but require less time and resources to do so (which in turn, brings cost down for more students).
Personas
For MVP, we wanted to focus on driving omnichannel, operational efficiencies for the business. This means creating a tool for the internal Vault Prep team.
With this in mind, Vault Prep’s main user group is their employee tutor base — 20-30 part-time individuals that worked out of the Vault Prep office on an appointment basis. I interviewed 5 Vault Prep tutors to gather information and created a persona that captured their needs and pain points (see below).
Other stakeholders include:
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The high-school students they tutor — between sophomore and senior years. Students range in educational abilities and all have a shared end goal of attending a “prestigious” four-year university in the United States.
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The affluent parents that pay for sessions — One hour of tutoring costs $200-$400 depending on the tutor’s experience, so seeing results is very important for them.
Main Problems
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Problem #1 Inadequate Student Tracking Leads to Wasted Time + Energy
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Tutors jump from session to session and are asked to write session notes for each student. The notes are usually shorthand and incomplete because how difficult it is to remember details at the end of the day. This means that the student’s next tutor spends significant time retracing the prior tutor’s steps.
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Homework is rarely tracked in session notes, so tutors rely on student’s to self report the homework that was assigned and complete. They also can’t track how frequently a student is missing homework assignments.
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Problem #2: Communicating Progress and Improvement Plans to Parents:
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The main performance measure is test scores, but lower than expected results can be influenced by student factors like test anxiety and not completing tutoring homework. Vault Prep doesn’t track student performance and engagement across sessions, so the team struggles to provide a full rationale for parents nor a concerted strategy for getting the student back on track.
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Executive summary
Tutors struggle to maximize their time with students because of messy or incomplete tracking notes, which ultimately creates slower progress for students. With Vault Prep’s premium client base, Vault Prep’s new digital platform should maximize session time and enhance deeper learning by creating easy, standardized systems for tracking students and their performance.
Strategy
Platform
Tutors have their laptops and/or tablet with them during sessions, so this platform should be friendly for those devices. Here are the other features we'll need to solve the tutor's problems:
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Tracking Students
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Navigation and Basic Information
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Student Detail Page (Profile)
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Student Search
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Progress Tracking
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Curriculum Overview
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Individual Modules (Learned + Mastered)
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Test Results
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Sessions:
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Add New Session (Standardized notes)
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Past Sessions
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Homework (Assigned and Completed)
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Others: Onboarding Materials, Practice Test tracking
Content mapping: the curriculum
Before designing, I also needed to map out the ACT curriculum for a digital context and help Vault Prep define what progress looks like:
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Curriculum: tutors memorized the main curriculum “modules” or categories and there was no shared resource that housed that information. I needed to translate those mental models into a concrete, digital framework.
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Defining Progress: "mastering” a skill was subjective and varied from tutor to tutor. I needed to work with the team to a) define “mastery” of a skill and b) visualize that progress.
sitemap
After defining the main platform features and the curriculum, I mapped out the sitemap and user flow.
Design
low fidelity
I drew up a series of wireframes and shared them with the client before moving into Low Fidelity mocks. This is where most of the curriculum and experiential issues came to light.
Sessions
Tutors need a standardized way of logging session notes to save time and energy. I created a “Session Builder” featuring preset cards that tutors could “add to their session.” The four card types represented the categories of actions that occur during a session: Concept (teaching the student a new lesson), Practice (exercises and practice tests), Mastery (helping a student master a concept) and Homework (assigned at the end of session).
I also created an overview page for tutors to reference the prior sessions.
Curriculum and module progress
I created a Curriculum Overview page with a birds eye view of each Curriculum category, or “module”. I also created a homework completion section, progress gauges for how much has been taught and mastered, and exercise resources that have been used by the student (activities or assignments). Tutors can click on any of the modules on the page to learn more (English Correctness in Image B).
User interview insights
I created a low-fidelity prototype using the main screens and observed 4 Vault Prep tutors navigate the platform. Here were the key issues to be resolved:
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Curriculum refinement: Interestingly, it became clear during user interviews that we don’t have a standardized way for defining “learning” or “mastery” within a module, so we needed to better define that.
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Toggling and Navigation: While building a session, tutors wanted to reference prior sessions and student progress, which meant exiting the current session they were building and returning to the screen.
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Tracking progress: the curriculum overview page felt busy, with too much information showing at once.
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Session Builder: the steps to create a session felt duplicative in certain areas and reductive in others. I needed to better define the user flow for the Session Builder.
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Homework Flow: the original prototype didn’t have an experience for marking homework as completed.
MEDIUM FIDELITY Mock-ups
the new navigation
In order to make the platform easier to navigate during sessions, I reframed the navigational structure and sitemap. By creating a secondary, left hand navigation, it became easier to weave in and out of the various parts of the student’s ACT plan.
Restructuring this also made the platform tablet-friendly since the buttons are located at the edges of the screen.
Simplified Curriculum and Module Overviews
After gathering further insights from the Vault Prep team on the curriculum, I simplified progress tracking experiences.
New session user flows
I simplified the Session Builder flow. See here for before and after with the new navigation, as well as the new and old user flows.
Homework flow
I created a Homework Flow within the new navigation for tutors to mark whether homework was complete, partially complete or incomplete.
user interviews
After completing the new mocks and before handing the project, I conducted another round of user interviews and shared those insights with the next designer.
HANDOFF
prototype
This was the latest prototype after handing the project off to the new designer. Enjoy!
closing thoughts
Standardized testing as a requirement for college admissions has been challenged in the past year, with college bribery scandals at schools like USC and Stanford putting a spotlight on the inequities of college admissions. Since handing off the designs, Vault Prep expanded the scope of the product to include regular and AP high school curriculums, and has rebranded to Emile School.