Spotivity case study

Overview

Spotivity is a digital platform connecting youth and their parents to after-school programs and activities. 

The company provides a double sided digital platform that serves Chicagoland area youth and their parents by giving them access to after-school programs. Our team was tasked to improve the administrative facing dashboard which helps after-school programs to maximize their reach and retention of participants.   

The outcome was a redesign of an internal facing platform with research  that has been tested and validated by target users.

Understanding the challenge

THE KICK OFF

Our client came to my team to help them explore ways to set them apart from all of the other management platforms by focusing on building a more robust and adaptable tool and adding value to each after-school agencies. The Spotivity platform already had built a beta version of an internal facing dashboard with features implemented from assumed user needs. The challenge was to unveil the pain points of what after school program agencies were facing when trying to accomplish their daily tasks of managing their programs and their students.

Understanding client goals

During the first kick off with our client, we made sure to understand their business and product goals by identifying their intended audience, existing constraints and how they would define success.

The primary value for premium agencies is a website that helps them generate and measure a material increase in participation, engagement and general exposure to their program

Diving into research

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

With the client’s goal in mind, we set 3 research objectives:

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPETITOR

We looked into top competitors with target audience of small businesses, administrative staff, schools, sports leagues and clubs as well as non-profit organizations within the Chicagoland area. Underlining themes included education and after-school/productive stimulation for youth.

To gain a different perspective, we also looked at indirect competitors like Yelp, Instagram, Opentable, Linkedin, Salesforce, Mindbody and Donortools, to see if there were any opportunities we could leverage.

They provided a lot of insights on how to effectively engage and motivate users through features and functionality that are working well and which users are familiar with.

We discovered that the  management tools out on the market were already being implemented and a few of these competitors did it very well. Yet, there were still some opportunities and gaps we can leverage moving forward.

UNDERSTANDING OUR USERS

Who we spoke to

DISCOVERING INSIGHTS

SYNTHESIZING WHAT WE HEARD

After synthesizing the insights, the team grouped users between nonprofit and for-profit agencies/programs. We found nonprofit organizations prioritized money as an important element in their business where for-profit or established organizations prioritized outreach to participants. The common denominator between the two groups included time, which is a driving factor for both goals.

We also found one of the biggest trend of challenge that emerged: lack of centralized platform where they can access reports, engagement and recruitment. 

With this opportunity, our team decided to place emphasis on building a consolidated view of the metrics to track the most essential information to help save time.

Outlining the problem

THE PROBLEM STATEMENT

From our insights we found overlapping themes regarding the importance of outreach, retention, and recruitment. The more time agencies have to foster meaningful relationships with the students, the better chances of a program succeeding. With this in mind, we defined the problem to solve for:

Now that we had a clearer view of the problem after-school agencies faced, we created three design guidelines to help influence our design decisions to make a product that was efficient, engaging and easy to use.

Empathize and Define

IDEATION

Our concepts

After narrowing down to 12  low-fidelity paper prototypes, we tested for the following 5 themes to address our findings from user insights:

• Customization

• Data Visualization

• Communication

• Student information

• Business tasks

PUTTING OUR CONCEPTS TO TEST

We tested for desirability and usefulness of each concept and explored how users might integrate these into their current organization task management habits. We tested 5 users with experience working in nonprofit/for-profit organizations. This helped us to define opportunities and recommendations.

Even though we felt the need for all 5 themes we concepted for, we knew we had to part ways with the ones that didn’t test well with our users. We decided to take all the positive points of feedback and focus in on the drill down of the dashboard metrics and to hone in on student profile feature for Spotivity’s redesigned platform. As for the customization concept, we decided to forego the drag and drop function as it would require unnecessary extra hours of their developers. We came up with a simpler solution to customization which was more feasible.

We envisioned the new Spotivity to be a platform that encourages users to be efficient in their administrative tasks so that they could spend more time helping their agency and its students reach their goals.

We met with our client to align with our next step of creating an MVP.

Explore and learn

The drill down

We began by mapping out a student’s interaction with the front end of Spotivity to gain insight into what agency would see on their dashboard

Following this double-sided journey helped us to move forward with prototyping the agency side of the dashboard.

• We incorporated the following features:

  • Customization

    • Report creation

  • Data Visualization

    • Attendance & program tracker

    • Report information

  • Student information

    • Student progress snapshot

Results

For our last client meeting, we delivered a mid-fidelity prototype to our client after iterating based on the usability tests we conducted along with a future product roadmap. Our team also redesigned Spotivity’s landing page and created a tablet and mobile view of the dashboard.

Link to InVision prototype

The product

DASHBOARD HOMEPAGE

Validated key Features: Data Visualization of attendance and tracker
Aggregate view of: Overview, Visits, Attendance, Retention
Detailed view of: Total students, Total views, Total favorites, Total check-ins

METRICS DETAILED VIEW

Validated key features: Data Visualization of report information
Detailed view of: Traffic of the demographic, profile views and unique visitors, visualized view of total views by months, student check in, and import/export options

STUDENT PROFILE

Validated key features: Student progress snapshot
Featuring visualized data: Attendance, demographics
With detailed information on: Progress, parental information, basic information, note section

Something extra

The impact

Client feedback

Our new design and interactive prototype was well received by our client who was enthusiastic about implementing our dashboard design into Spotivity’s internal facing platform.  The client entrusted us to move forward as advisors and our next steps are to be in communication with the developer team to take our product to implementation.

UPDATE (September 30, 2019)

We recently received an email from our client:

“I wanted to reach out to let you know that almost all of your input into Spotivity has been realized. I first focused on the app and that launched in the new iteration earlier in the spring. Additionally, the re-vamp of the admin dashboard and marketing website is about to launch.”

Future Recommendations

Due to the time constraint of our sprints, we couldn’t address every gaps and opportunities we wanted to. Through insights from usability testing, we gathered the following future recommendations:

• Implement metadata for IA

• Capture more  metrics for student information

• Create various calendar view for coaches, athletes, faculties, parents and students 

• Implement on/off autofill

What I learned

Working in a fast-paced, collaborative environment for a client was a thrilling experience. I was able to quickly adapt and learn how to leverage each teammate’s strengths to work efficiently and to deliver meaningful solutions to research-validated problems. This project has given me an invaluable lesson to trust the process and to value research to make impactful user-driven design decisions. I have also learned how to recognize constraints and to work within those limitations.

My key learnings include: