We did a brainstorming session based on non-profit sustainable goals and wrote down and analyzed our current understanding and assumptions in each section. For the team, it is essential to get the same interest in topics and goals. After discussion, we narrow the concept and select the quality education as our project theme.

Our research started from learn more about the current homeschool statistics and situation in the United States and better understand homeschooling.

Afterwards, we prepared some materials, DIY kits and went to KidSpace to observe how kids would like. In this process, we also talked with their parents about homeschool opinion.

To better understand the user's needs, we talked with 5 people in-person on their experiences. We produced interview questions by doing a brainstorming session and decided on a mixed-method, with quantitative and qualitative interviews. The interviewees were selected based on their representativeness. We contacted 1 homeschooled student, 2 professors, who are also the parents of homeschooling kids, 1 professional of online education tech, and 1 professional of kids education. Here are part of the questionnaire and a few quotes from the interviewees.

The biggest stereotype surrounding homeschooling is that constant one-on-one teaching deprives kids of the socialization they need to thrive. However, it doesn't the truth. Homeschooled kids are just as likely to play soccer and do group projects as any other students. So we decided to change direction and focus on quality education use the method of through target groups' "Needs," "Behaviors," "Frustrations," "Gaps," and "Goals,"  target our users' main current pain points and come up with solutions.

With all the collected data and insights, we started creating an Empathy Map to document a typical day in a homeschooler's life. Here are the user's actions, mood, and pains. This helped us understand where in the journey a viable solution could place.

To understand solutions already on the market to understand the existing market and the industry gaps, we decided to conduct competitive research and find opportunities. By competitor's analysis, we could see how companies are currently working, what they are missing, how we could connect it to our solution.

After discovering, analyzing, and understanding our target users, we utilize this information to solidify further our core user's behaviors, pain points, motivations, and needs.

In Project Based Learning, students engage them in solving a real-world problem or answering a complicated question. They demonstrate their knowledge and skills by developing a public product or presentation for a real audience. As a result, students develop in-depth content knowledge and critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills to do an authentic, meaningful project.

I designed how we expected the information architecture to be. We break down the hierarchy based on the user's needs and goals. The flow chart below is the final information architecture.

Once having established our wireframes' flow based on our chosen platform and tasks, I started sketching low-fi wireframes to get an overall sense of the layouts and hierarchy of each feature's design and quickly test our assumptions with multiple users.

👀 That's all for now! 😊 Thanks for reading!