The story:
Firsqu is a project developed by Cattat-SYS to break the barriers between teachers and students and to make education more flexible and available to everyone. Catalin Alexandru, the developer was doing an excelent job on the programming side ( Angular with Typescript using Material Design from Google ) but the project was missing a designer, so I saw here the perfect opportunity for me to get involved and apply UX techniques while helping create a successful product.
The problem
Our project purpose was to mediate between students and teachers and bring them on the same platform.
The teachers are the ones who have to manage this groups, invite students that they know or accept students that we find for them. Teachers also need to manage courses and evaluation. This process could get a bit complicated and long so we had to find the best way to support them by creating an easy to use application and interface.
Students on the other hand have very limited time and budget and we need to convince them we are a good place which is open, affordable and has quality materials.
First Steps
I met with Catalin, the project owner to see where I can step in and contribute. We had then a meeting with a group of students and a second one with teachers to empathize with them and understand what were their needs and expectations.
Using the information we had so far I started building the personas, I had to do 2 different personas as the student and teacher were quite different at key points.
Went further and did journey maps for both my personas, as again they had different access and aproach to the application. For example the teacher had a management account and the student had a more simple account. Their roles and goals were different.
Togheter with the owner, we did a fast initial sketch of the site structure, identifying which pages and sections we tought we need.
Then I draw some fast prototypes, trying to take a bit further our study, covering the the public area and also the secured area which both our user types see after they have an account.
We were asking ourselves how can we make the site tasks easy to be executed so that we offer our users the best experience. We realized a site flow and a user flow could benefits in the way that it could provides us with a clear structure to see how many pages we would have and how many steps the users have to take.
The Brand
The first stage of this project was dedicated to education, while having in mind to expand the brand domain in the future. The name Firsqu comes from First Quality of Services and I managed to introduce the T inside the Q. Next, I researched the 2 base colors for the brand. The color blue is the color of trust and responsibility, amplifying the professionalism of our teacher partners and the color green symbolizes the opening, affordable and easy to access.
Developing the website
I am now working on the CSS and applying what we discovered trough UX to a MVP version of the product. I am using Angular too to be able to synchronize good with the developer (we work in parallel, code + style) and we adapt on the go.