From Confusion to Conversion
How a Redesigned Website Boosted Enrollment for a Children's Coding School
My Role.
User Research
Visual Design
User Testing
Team.
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Timeline.
Jan - Feb 2021
Client.
Coding For Kids
“I have 2 main issues. First, the bounce rate on the signup page is too high. And next - I need to make scheduling easier so customers can slot their kids in without needing me to step in to broker that between teachers and students.”
Menachem Fleur, Coding For Kids CEO
01. Executive Summary.
The Problem.
Coding For Kids At Home coding school is poised for growth but needs to first improve the site's user experience in registering and scheduling classes.
The Goal.
To streamline the process of choosing a course package and increasing conversion from visitor to enrolee.
To update the class scheduler.
The Solution.
An updated class scheduler and sign up process.
The Impact.
Our client really loved our design and is currently looking for a software engineer to build it out, and our team will be brought back to collaborate directly with the developer.
02. Background Information.
The Kickoff.
Coding For Kids At Home, a Toronto-based private online coding school, landed a contract with the local school district and is poised for growth. The website is negatively impacted by a high bounce rate on their signup page, as well as complaints from parents around the class scheduling feature.
"How Might We increase clickthrough, bolster enrollment, and make the scheduling experience easier for users? "
03. Research.
User Interviews & Contextual Inquiries.
Sourcing users throughsocial media, we conducted 5 one-on-one sessions asking users to go through the current website and give us their thoughts. Through our kickoff meeting with CEO Menachen Fleur, we learned that the main users of his site are mothers with children who attend elementary school.
Interview Questions.
Some of the questions we asked our participants:
Do your children participate in online activities?
What criteria do you use when choosing online activities for your child?
As you go through the site, can you summarize your understanding of the Coding For Kids program?
On a scale of 1 - 10, 1 being absolutely not and 10 being absolutely, how likely are you to sign your child up for this course? Feel free to elaborate.
User Tasks Performed.
We asked participants to perform several tasks:
Please navigate through the site and tell me your initial impressions, thoughts, and feelings about the site.
Go through the process of choosing and purchasing a course.
Register your child for a time slot of your choosing.
Mapping It All Out.
After the user interviews came the affinity map. Quotes from each user were distilled onto individual sticky notes and then grouped by major theme for clarity. Main user takeaways are shown below:
Meet Janet.
Janet is a 38-year old attorney and mother of 2 children, aged 9 and 11. She wants to sign her kids up for coding classes, and is concerned about her children's safety online. She wants to know a bit about the people behind the program, and the teachers who'll be uiding her clhildren's online learning.
Her main frutrations while course shopping involve not finding the pricing and other pertinent information quickly on a course website. She also guages whether her kids might enjoy a particular course by their reaction to the website it's offered on.. She says...
"If my kids don't enjoy the website, they might not enjoy the courses offered."
Journey Map.
Using feedback fromour research, we mapped out the journey that Janet has to take while navigating the current Coding For Kids At Home website. This helped us to hone in on pain points we needed to adress with our design solution.
Solution Statement.
By building an efficient navigation and scheduling process we will have less confusion about course details and build trust in taking an online coding class. We will now this to be true through user feedback of our prototype.
Original Site Map.
To guide our site layout, we next audited the layout of the original site. It was clear that the original layout was cumbersome, with information buried several layers deep.
Revised Site Map.
Simplifying the site mapby combining like information and removing extraneous details made sense. The revised site map is much more streamlined and reducesthe number of clicks while navigating through to sign up. Our revision is much simpler and more straightforward.
04. Visual Design.
Crazy 8s.
We jump-started our creative iteration process by listing features that should appear on each site page. Then we each came up with a series of sketches. Here are a few of mine:
From Sketches to High Fidelity.
The Crazy 8s exercise helped us identify which features worked best for each page. in the end, we chose my sketches, tweaked to include features frmo my 2 teammates' own sketches. Here is how the Register page evolved:
05. Building Trust.
Before...
The original site had an intro video [A] which spoke about the program. User feedback uncovered an interesting tidbit: users were concerned about WHO their child spends time with online. The intro video wasn't enough to build that trust.
After...
Our design solutionincluded a "Meet The CEO" and "Meet the Instructors" sections on the About page. Teacher photos have quick blurbs introducing them to parents.
High Fidelity Screens...
Here are some of the screens that later comprised our prototype.
Research Made Clickable: Our Prototype.
After completing all of the high fidelity screens we created the clickable prototype which can be found here.
06. Usability Testing.
Testing It Out.
We next conducted Zoom usability tests with 7 users. We quietly observed, measuring time and number of clicks taken, as they navigated signing up for a course and scheduling a time slot.
07. Delivery.
08. How We Addressed The Main Pain Points.
4
Iterations
57
Screens
1
Satisfied Client
“You did a fantastic job!I'll message you soon for the actual build!”
Menachem Fleur, Coding For Kids CEO
10. Outcome.
Lessons Learned.
Building trust was essential in getting parent users to register for online extracurricular activities for their kids. That trust is achieved by allowing parents to put faces to the names of those they will entrust with their children's care and learning.
Ensuring that course pricing information is easily displayed alleviates parental frustration and allows them to quickly decide whether to purchase course packets.
A surprising find was that making sure that the site is kid friendly (through cartoon graphics and a happy color scheme) often converted on the fence users into paying customers - if their kids think that the site is "cool", parents assume they'll have fun in the actual course.
If We Had More Time.
The 3-week timeframe meant that we had to prioritize adressing the most pressing issues (ease of navigation, trust, ease of registration). If we had more time, gathering actual photos of each teacher before our deadline but will add them and update our prototype for the next phase.
Next Steps.
Our client stated that he intends to adopt our design solution and is currently seeking out a software developer to build it out. He will bring us on to consult during the build process as soon as the developer is hired.