SomaSawa - Soogi Choi ✺ UX/Product Designer

SAWA APP

A teaching app to bridge educational gaps and streamline lesson planning

Duration

16 weeks
(May - Sep, 2023)

Team

Me, UX/Product Designer
5 Designers
1 Design Manager
1 Product Manager
1 Product Lead
1 Stakeholder

My Roles

End-to-End
UI Prototyping
UI Components & Design System
Wireframing
User Flows & Sitemap
Usability Testing
User Interview & Survey
Handoff Documentation

Tools

Figma
Notion
Adobe Creative Suite
Dovetail

Our client, Sawa Africa, is a non-profit organization that provides resources and skills for Kenyan communities to thrive in education, health, and economic development.

SomaSawa is one of their educational programs for elementary schools to support fundamental gaps in numeracy and literacy.

However, the learning program faced challenges with the handwriting recording system and lesson planning. So, our client reached out to us for a digital solution for their educators.

A group of children with a teacher doing SomaSawa's learning activity. (Photo from Rafiki Africa website)

Teachers rely on paper for planning lessons, which is time-consuming and inconsistent.

Paper-based attendance recording is also difficult to track students' performance.

Problem

How can we ensure consistency in SomaSawa's teaching program and streamline record tracking?

Solution

Empower teachers to log class and lesson plans by student groups, integrating to-do lists and leveraging experienced input through keyword suggestions and @tag.

Outcome 1

Designed an Android app and design system end-to-end that is ready to imply at next phase

Outcome 2

Streamlined the complex learning program, saving 40 mins/day on lesson planning and student assessment

Outcome 3

95% of teachers highly approved of the app, indicating its strong alignment with the Somasawa program.

Centralized actions on home screen

We centralized teachers’ essential tasks in a home screen: easy clock-in, clock-out, and student attendance recording.

Effortless attendance recording

Recording attendance is made easy with a checkbox list, including select/deselect all and sorting options. This boosts accuracy and efficiency in data entry.

Lesson planning with to-do list and suggestions

Teachers can leverage insights from fellow educators with keyword-based suggestions and plan their lessons on to-do lists.

Sharing lesson plans with educators

Teachers can @tag their mentor or their peers, and the tagged person can jump into the page. It would especially handy when teachers ask lesson-off day or ask feedback on their teaching plans.

Smooth student assessment

Manage student profiles with ease, including key personal info, attendance, and performance tracking. The app auto-documents student progress using daily agenda to-do lists.

See Prototype

Three sides to every story

To uncover program infrastructure issues deeply, we interviewed all levels of SomaSawa educators: program coordinator (overseeing whole schools), mentors (mentoring teachers), and teachers.

Also, we had to wake up at 5 a.m. to meet the educators from Kenya 🫠

Program coordinators and mentors focused on record tracking and substituting absent teachers, while teachers highlighted lesson plan concerns. As teachers are major app users, we surveyed them to gain more insights after the interview, exploring motivations and challenges in SomaSawa's teaching.

The gathered responses from the interview and survey were meticulously categorized into five key themes.

Curriculum concerns

Teachers' curriculum planning is often hindered due to vague agreements, incomplete activities, and a lack of target objectives.

Difficulties in paper-based systems

Paper-based systems hinder accurate attendance, lesson tracking, and student progress assessment.

Communication challenge

Educators rely on verbal communication for lesson-off requests and curriculum feedback, which is not efficient.

Frustration on wasting time

8/14 teachers mentioned inadequate time for SomaSasa, especially on lesson planning and student performance tracking.

Grouping students by level

Teachers group students by their performance so they can teach students at their level

Scoping

Engaging in weekly meetings, we shared our findings with the client stakeholder, sparking in-depth discussions on each insight and scoping that is feasible under our timeline.

Through iterative exchanges, we ultimately honed in on the three core pain points with 6 use cases.

Curriculum inconsistencies

Issues arise from uneven communication, curriculum, and schedules. Clear expectations and consistent procedures are sought.

Standardized way to create a class

Before a new term starts, every teacher can create a new class in a uniform way

Keyword suggestions for teaching objectives

Suggested weekly objectives or daily activities will show up based on teachers' keyword input

Ineffective tracking system

Current paper-based tracking hampers personalized teaching and risks record loss. A streamlined solution is needed.

Teacher attendance management

Allow teachers to clock in/out, take student attendance, apply for leave, and switch classes.

Daily activity to-do list

Enable teachers to plan daily activity to-do lists per group of students. They can check the activities as they go, and incomplete activities will be carried over to the next day.

Students' performance recording

Empower teachers to input students' records, including attendance, baseline and endline assessments, and auto-updates on completed weekly objectives.

Scattered communication

Absence of central communication leads to inefficiencies, heavily relying on verbal contact.

Tagging coworkers to share

Allow teachers to share their weekly objective and daily lesson plan pages with their mentor or coworker by leaving a comment with @tagging the person.

Visualizing solutions from none

One of our biggest challenges was immersing teachers' workflow into the solution without seeing the class. We couldn't travel to Kenya to observe it, and the SomaSawa program had no documented curriculum or standard to share with us.

So we decided to show possible solutions in greyscale low-fidelity wireframes to the client stakeholder and iterate weekly - 9 iterations, including weekly client check-ups and two usability tests with educators. Using greyscale lo-fi wireframes with user story context (instead of Lorem ipsum) was convenient for validating ideas visually and making significant changes quickly.

Click ↗ to look at a bigger view - iterations on the daily agenda

Home

Curriculum

Efforts for consistency

No two designers are the same & a team with 7 designers can be messy! We needed a adult guideline for design consistency.

We started by setting sizing, spacing, layout, grid guidelines, text styles, and color tokens. Based on those rules, we could move on to polish components.

Following Material Design 3 to optimize for Android and minimize developing effort, I ensured that every 60+ component was designed to be reusable and responsive, paid attention to accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), and annotated for seamless handoff.

I also oversaw 160+ hi-fi screens and ensured they followed the style guides, component library, and auto-layout.

🔒 Coming Soon

This part will be discussed in other case study - Sawa App: Design System

Result?

We evaluated the product by usability testing, survey, and client meeting.

KPI: Teachers' time on lesson planning, attendance recording, student assessment, and tracking students' progress

Streamlined the complex learning program, saving 40 mins/day on lesson planning and student assessment

95% of teachers highly approved of the app, indicating its strong alignment with the Somasawa program.

Norton Bay Watershed Council

Promoting donation with improved information hierarchy and streamlined contents management

Sawa App - Design System

Coming Soon Aligning 70+ styles and components and design consistency, following WCAG 2.1 guideline and Material Design 3