Mission Graduates App

OVERVIEW

Mission Graduates educates and connects parents with resources that help with the success of students in the San Francisco Unified School District, preparing them for graduation and college.

Tools

 
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  • Sketch

  • Adobe XD

  • Invision

  • Adobe Illustrator

  • Jira

  • UXPressia

  • Pencil and Paper

 

My Role

I worked on a team of three UX designers. I worked with a UX Lead and a UX researcher. While we all helped each other, my main role was working on the user interface. My main task was putting together wireframes, creating a style guide, translating the wireframes into high fidelity mockups in accordance with the style guide, and creating a prototype with those mockups.

Problem Statement

 
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How might we create an app that helps Mission Graduates communicate information about their workshops to their parents?

 
 

Target audience

  • Parents in the Spanish community with school-aged kids

  • English Language learners

  • New to the US education system

  • Working class

 
 

Research Plan & Results

  • Survey

  • User Interviews

  • Ethnographic Study

Through the research, it was discovered that:

  1. Most parents access the internet with their mobile devices.

  2. Schedule time restraints were due to work and children's' activities.

  3. Many parents don't speak English.

 

User Journey Map

With this information, we created a user persona to create a representation of who we are designing for: busy working parents with the success of their kids in mind.

Information Architecture

We took the information and features Mission Graduates had, and the information and features parents needed, and took to creating the site information architecture.

From this, our site map was formed and iterated on within the capacity of our developers. 

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Once our ideas were all organized, we mapped out our decision flow and site map.

Sketching and wireframes

We translated our ideas onto paper and made a few rounds of wireframe sketches. These evolved into digital wireframes.

 
 

hi-fi mockups

When the wireframes were finalized, it was time to create high fidelity mockups. This is when all our hard work came to fruition.

visions for the future

Mission Graduates is about effectively communicating with the community. In the future, we would like to work on: 

 
 
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  • A private messaging system. This will allow parents to directly reach Mission Graduates through the app for personalized questions and inquiries.

  • Downloading documents. Mission Graduates will be able to post important forms and documents that can be downloaded by the parents.

  • Broadening the language spectrum. So far Mission Graduates works primarily with Spanish and English speakers. San Francisco has a rich diversity of many different races and ethnicities. It would be beneficial to open up the services to more audiences.

 

Reflections

Nonprofit organizations offer great resources and support for the community, but sometimes this means you work with limited resources. Our team was built of volunteers, and while we were able to meet regularly, it took a bit of extra effort finding times and places to meet, as we all had different schedules.