Working full-stack on a personal project not only required extreme determination and focus centred on user needs but also the ability to learn and adapt to technologies and tools used at all stages of the process.
Being able to work remotely and having clear plan for the start-up I wanted to create I set off on a journey across 25+ countries to gather requirements and materials for it. As a final part of a journey I settled down in Bangkok, one of the most creative cities in the world, for 8 months. Fully immersed into gaining knowledge finished Harvard Extension School course on Building Dynamic Websites. Worked to improve front-end and back-end development coding. Dived into PHP, SQL, JavaScript, Vue.js and Laravel while studying amazing collection of books on different design topics at the library of Thailand Cultural and Design Centre.
Back in Poland put all acquired information and knowledge into designing and developing tutoreach. Below you can find some parts of the "making of".
Defining the problem
The project idea of international tutors hub came during my stay in United Kingdom where I realised none of the services over there was free of charge for tutors. It came as a surprise as being very familiar with similar websites back in Poland - from both sides of being a tutor and tutee - I knew it could run on a totally different business model. Being passionate about learning and teaching I decided to create new space for tutors that could:
- advertise their tuition for free
- reach audience within specified distance
- be able to reach international audience and provide tuition online
- be able to provide details in languages they know
- create a community where tutors would be the main force keeping content moderated
From the tutee's perspective the most important feature was to:
- be able to quickly find tutors next to them and filter them by different criteria
- have access to tutors that could speak their language (and provided content in this language) in case they reside in country where the official language is different
Strategy
Extensive user studies, competition research and defining of business objectives
Running preliminary research on potential users (mostly based on surveys, sometimes on interviews) resulted in definition of four focus groups and 4 personas:
- University students (tutor)
- Teachers (tutor)
- Ambitious Students (tutee)
- Student's Parents (tutee's guardian)
Personas as well as an extensive competition research helped to define business objectives followed by functional and content requirements.
Iterating and continuously running surveys at later stages while figuring out the best business model brought the slight changes and addition of school course search engine. This would ensure profits to run the start-up while keeping private tutors module free of charge as per primary objectives.
User research - Personas
Structure
Creation of system architecture, user, system and data flows
As big project as this one required careful organisation of functionalities and the way user will interact with system. Employing card sorting to create multiple user flow diagrams that greatly helped in creation and design of database and modules like mentioned in the problems section - user moderation.
System & data flow diagrams
Part of database design
SKELETON
Wireframes - interaction, navigation and information design
Having the user flows and the whole structure ready helped in definition of navigation, sitemap and user's interaction which resulted in the wireframes for all of the project's pages.
Wireframes for mobile registration process
Design System
Grid, colours, typography, graphics, website components symbols library
Colour system design
Typography system design
Symbols library
Interface Design
Design of all of the pages together with interaction / state design
Going through all of the design and development stages helped me to meet all of the business objectives as well as create seamless user experience. The project is going now through final tests and the release date is set to June 2019.
Search results page
