Meeting Needs for Parents, Students, and School

Problem
​Parents and guardians need a method to manage funds and scheduling for school cafeteria lunches.  An opportunity to design of a mobile application for managing payments for student lunches was presented to students in the Kent State University Masters in User Experience Design program. 

​My Role
User Experience Research and Design. ​Designed from concept to prototype delivery in seven weeks, the Lunch Money Buddy mobile app is an example of lean UX.  Essential for the success of this project: Sketching, Omnigraffle, Sketch, proto.io, and InVision. ​

UX Disciplines: Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, Interface Design, User Research,Visual Design, Writing for UX..
​Deliverables: User Interviews, Personas, User Journeys, Usability Testing, Wireframes, Prototypes.

Approach
Functional Specifications provided by Stakeholders

• Manage funds and lunch payments for multiple students in their family across schools in a single school district
• Track each student’s lunch money balance
• View upcoming lunches
• View meal details including nutritional information
• Indicate favorite student meals
• Set reminders for upcoming favorite meals
• Close account

To understand school cafeteria lunch practices from a variety of perspectives and ages, I conducted a survey on social. 17 respondents clarified parent goals, needs, context, and school practices.
  
UX Researchers at Kent State crafted personas. I used the prepared personas to develop empathy, learn about user context, and understand the intersection of user needs with business goals. 


User Journeys
To understand user context, progression, functionality, device interaction, and emotions, I created storyboards of user journeys in Sketch illustrating scenarios for the personas. The journey maps informed elements of information architecture and interaction design for the app and include a rationale for each user journey.

Design Tenets
The User Journeys and social research surfaced several Design Tenets

• Adding funds is top priority
• Sign Up must be easy
• Navigation must be quick
• Navigation must be one-handed
• If the app isn’t convenient, it won’t be used

 
 
Information Architecture
Moving from abstract needs and ideas to concrete and testable design, I crafted an information architecture for the mobile app with three topic based navigation elements:
·      Students
·      Menus
·      My Account
 
A diagram of the content structure of the app (or site map) was crafted in Omnigraffle based on the needs of the personas, insights from the scenarios, and from the functional specifications. The navigational structure went through a design review and was updated after reviewer feedback.

Wireflow based on the Information Architecture. 

​A tree test of the organizational structure measured design intention against user goals. Problems with adding funds was revealed. 

Designs were updated, went through design review and the most successful wireframes were converted into an interactive prototype. early wireframes were used for testing. 

​Lessons Learned
Particularly useful were insights gathered from users early in the process. User testing of the taxonomy exposed problems in the navigation. Feedback from parents and students provided valuable ideas for iterating on designs. 
 
Design is a never-ending process. The needs of parents, guardians, students, and schools will change over time. The Lunch Money Buddy app should be tested regularly and iterated upon as user needs change.