Joselyn McDonald

Design Research

Client: AccelaSchool

AccelaSchool, a small yet highly (financially) successful software-as-a-service company came to Verrah Inc. with a problem. The adoption of their product Ecollect, a digital tool that allows K-12 schools to switch from paper forms to digital forms - was very low. A pattern had emerged and AccelaSchool needed help breaking the following cycle: Senior school administrators (e.g. principals, superintendents) would purchase a subscription plan with AccelaSchool. The senior administrators would ask teachers to send required forms digitally to parents using Ecollect. Many schools were only receiving 30% of the required forms from parents via Ecollect. Teachers were rebelling, administrative assistants were frustrated, and parents were lost about whether to use the platform or use paper forms. Our client worried that this would lead to schools canceling their contracts during the following year’s budget cycle.

Problem: Adoption of the product was lower than expected in most schools. The organization was not engaging with end-users.

For close to a year, I worked with AccelaSchool’s CEO and senior leadership team to educate their organization about human-centered design and research. I scoped, planned, and led many research programs for the organization. After spending time with the senior leadership, design, and development team (contextual inquiry method), it was revealed that the organization had no real understanding or empathy for the end-users - teachers, administrators, and parents. Despite being a company valued at 10 million dollars, they still functioned primarily like a startup. They focused the majority of their efforts and personnel on building relationships with public school senior leadership. The organization rarely engaged meaningfully with the actual users of their product. It was clear that the organization needed to learn more about its end-users in order to build a product and variety of support services to increase adoption of their product. To begin this work, I set out to co-create informed end-user archetypes with a cross-functional team at AccelaSchool that could help the organization focus on the exact needs of their users.

Method: Archetypes of end-users to connect the organization to its end-users and support empathy development
All design research methods have a downside. Archetypes and personas can hinge on stereotypes if not properly informed. To combat that issue, I worked with the sales department and the support desk to gather information and anecdotes about teachers and administrators they engaged with during a month-long period. Simultaneously, I interviewed a diverse group of parents with children attending schools using Ecollect. After the discovery phase ended, I pooled the data and invited the AccelaSchool working group to come together to develop archetypes with me in a facilitated workshop.

Findings: Archetypes were created for common parent types, teachers, and administrative assistants.

The data coupled with the archetype development workshop revealed incredibly useful information about their end-users and pain points in the user-experience journey (which was the next area of design research inquiry). Regarding administrators, the data revealed patterns and themes related to a loss of control over systems they had long had in place, which made them feel like they had lost power. Often, as a form of slight retaliation, the administrators were not regularly reminding teachers to ask parents to submit the forms digitally. Meanwhile, teachers felt that there had not been enough onboarding and they did not feel comfortable with the system. Teachers also felt like they had a lot on their plates already at the start of the school year and learning a new system for communicating and eliciting form compliance was not feasible. Finally, the data collected from my interviews with parents surfaced an interesting theme - some parents were not technologically savvy and/or didn’t have access to computers at home, which caused issues with compliance with the digital form mandate. Yet, even the parents who were sophisticated with technology felt like the Ecollect tool could use improvements (which led to a heuristic analysis and usability testing study).

Results: The organization became enamored with human-centered design strategies and research methods. They shifted their focus towards user experience. Invested in the needs of their users. Tangibly, we co-developed resources for the website and a guidebook that supported distinct user groups (e.g., teachers, administrative assistants, and parents) through the journey of onboarding, which rapidly improved adoption.

After the facilitated workshop, I collected the data gathered by the AccelaSchool working group, combined it with my own interview data in order to develop four archetypes: teacher, administrator, parent (low-tech capabilities), parent (tech proficient). I created poster-sized archetypes that were hung in the working spaces of every department that participated in product design or engaged with customers. The CEO requested the posters as well and credited the work with changing his attitude about investing in user-experience as well as sales efforts. Through investing in a cultural shift that prioritized the needs of users, redesigns of the product informed by analysis and usability testing and conducting competitive analyses, AccelaSchool dramatically increased the adoption of Ecollect. A year after they became my design strategy client, they were acquired by one of the largest education technology organizations in the United States.