Overview
Designing a parent portal for Kumon North America
Kumon North America faces challenges in providing transparent progress insights from tutors to parents, negatively impacting customer retention rates, specifically when parents may not readily observe tangible results from Kumon's repetitive learning approach.
Our intervention of a parent portal lets parents see how well their child is doing with Kumon's method of consistent study and self-learning. It helps parents understand their child's progress and encourages them to support these important study habits at home.
Problem Space
Differentiating in a dense, competitive landscape
According to exit surveys dating back to 2016-2017, 56% of dropouts were directly linked to parents’ perceptions of goals or their views on communications.
Mino Tanabe, CEO of Kumon North America
Insights
Insufficient Perception on Student Progress
“Parents may come in frustrated, doubting the progress... but if you explain what your objectives are, they calm down so fast. You can impact the child’s attitude to have these conversations regularly [with the parent].”
Kevan Gentle, Assistant Vice President of Kumon North America
Lack of Parent-Tutor Collaboration
Question:
What do most parents find to be appropriate workload for this age? I'm wondering how continuity works with levels...
Hannah Grace:
"For me, I sometimes talk to my instructor whether it’s too hard or too much, and she will either give me some revision sets or cut down my workload a little more."
Reddit, Kumon
Point of Intervention
The current Kumon Connect (tablet app only) requires parents to view information on the same device the students use. For this reason, we designed an experience for parents in a mobile environment for their convenience.
Moreover, the tablet app is crammed with a lot of useful information but is not shown well so a lot of the information is hard to find.
Reframing
How might we establish a centralized progress checking platform on Kumon Connect for concerned parents of students, in order to foster student retention in the program and help them effectively progress in a long-term study?
Process
Curated experience in thoughtful iterations
User Flow
During research, I assessed the brand value pillars of "Consistency in Learning" and "Collaboration with Parents", which helped us gather insights and reframe the problem space to align with these key values and the target users.
Design sprint
is a focused, 5-day process where user-centered teams collaborate to solve design challenges. By leveraging expert insights, they brainstorm, prototype, and test solutions with selected users.
Day 1 - Understand
In the survey we conduced, 23 out of 24 parents would like to be informed on completed worksheets and time completion, 15 out of 24 parents choosing a more centralized communication platform to interact with tutors; while 25 out of 33 tutors choosing to stick with current currents methods of direct communication with parents such as email or phone call.
Day 3 - Converge
I developed the low-fidelity mocks based on the results from parent survey and interviews with two experts(ex Kumon tutors).
Day 5 - Testing
We did the rapid user testing session with 7 users to consolidate the usability of the user flow and main interfaces.
Day 6 - Reiterations
As the group leader, I took an essential role in quality control and making quick decisions, ensuring that every iteration brought us closer to our final solution.
Design System
Crafted art direction
Considering above UX screen flow; design system and UI design screens have been created following the agile process alongwith iterations wherever needed.
Results
Evaluations and values
Values we delivered
On the customer side, parents will gain insights into whether Kumon provides an effective learning environment for their child. Through transparent progress tracking, parents are more likely to acquire aspirational value as responsible and caring parents.
Kumon will enhance customer trust and loyalty by transparently sharing their vision of consistency and mastery of foundational skills through progress tracking for parents. This, in turn, will increase customer retention, providing tangible value to our client, Kumon North America.
After presentation
5 out of 6 guest speakers from the design industry confirmed that they buy the need for our design. One speaker agreed but suggested considering clearly defining the age range of the students involved.
Overall, the feedback was positive and provided valuable insights into further refining our centralized progress tracking platform on Kumon Connect parent portal.
