OneInMath
2020 • Lead Product Designer
OneInMath
2020 • Lead Product Designer
OneInMath is a program from the Bay Area, CA where children learn math afterschool.
This program has benefited over 1,000 children and supported by over 100 high school volunteers.
Overview
I was asked to design a mobile app for the OneInMath program, as the current process was heavily reliant on paper and Google forms. This would enable parents, students, volunteers, and librarians to have a singular application, and eliminate much of the manual processing.
I worked directly with the founder of OneInMath to understand and review their process. The ultimate goal was to create a platform so the location could continue to scale.
My Role
I was the lead product designer for this project. I did everything from research -> spec design. I would meet with the CEO of OneInMath directly every week to review design work.
Problem
T management of everything was done by paper, which as you can imagine, is not scalable. The idea was to have a mobile app for all personas (students, volunteers, parents, and librarians). From there, the app could eventually be expanded to more locations and sections.
Opportunity
The benefits of creating a mobile app were immense. Additionally, the truth is, at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic then hit the world, and made the need for a mobile app that much more necessary.
Research
I went to work and understood the learning application landscape. This meant for both desktop and mobile, as well as school apps (ex. Google Classroom) versus learning apps like Lingokids.
After some research, it became increasingly clear what the flows were for all the personas involved, and the various type of pages each platform had.
I would also meet with the CEO, and understand how each session worked. This meant understanding every step that happened for each persona in the real world. Then from there, I could map out in my head (and write down) how that would work on the app.
Design Thinking
We needed to understand the relationship between all the objects. I worked with the CEO directly to break down how each persona's actions affected each other.
My Work
Here are some high level sequences of what I designed for each persona. Each prototype for each persona was very large, so here are the top level screens.
This sequence at a high level shows joining the platform as a volunteer. From here, a volunteer can look at a details of a section, as well as drill into anyone's profile.
Students could upload their classwork and homework for the volunteers or parents to review. Each week, the volunteers reviewed with the students their learning to test if they could move on, or they needed to repeat a section.
When designing, it was decided that the look and feel would resemble something similar to Google Classroom or Khan Academy, something more like a classroom app for learning, versus a very colorful children's learning app.
Here are examples of some of the patterns I thought about when designing the app. I would look at a lot of other mobile apps such as Slack or Gmail for inspiration on the "professional" look and feel we were going for. This meant using things like material icons, or have small and succint text sizes, or spacing by increments of 8 pixels.
I designed an in-app messaging system so volunteers could chat with eachother, as well as parents communicate with the volunteer directly, and students could message their volunteers.
In these screens I designed, I'm showing how parents have full control over their account, from their family, linked accounts, profile information, and much more.
Children nowadays are very good with technology and smartphones. Therefore, they needed access to the app as well. So I designed the app for the student persona, where they could register and view their section details, as well as their uploaded classwork/homework.
I also designed an admin dashboard, where all objects in the application could be managed. For example, if the admin changed the name of a course packet, that change would be propagated on the end user side.
Results
After designing the mobile apps, I delivered the designs the mobile app engineer to work on it. Overall, it was a very great experience. Additionally, I could sit back and think that it was a cool thing to work on this. If this helped in any way of the future advancement of kids, then I'll happy it made an impact.
Designing an app like this was a challenge but ultimately a good one. I researched apps like Google Classroom or Canvas to understand what are all the primary use cases that teachers and students alike need in an application.
Ultimately, I created a very large clickable prototype for each persona, and did almost an hour worth of video reviews to hand off to engineers to explain all the little nuances.
