A One-Stop-Shop

Mental Health Resource for Educators

In the Winter of 2023, Maro had perfected an app for parents concerned with mental health issues, but the goal was to create a web-app for teachers and counselors.

I was a part of an ambitious project to design a comprehensive problem-solving mental health resource for schools.

Maro provides several resources for teachers from ways to monitor student behavioral health to trauma-informed professional development and social-emotional learning curriculum that students desperately need. In the late Spring of 2023,  Maro was awarded the 2023 GSV Cup for Risk Detection in Pediatric Behavioral Health.

My Role

As a UX Research and Design consultant, I collaborated with a team of three other designers, and we each took on various roles as we went through the various phases of design. 

Throughout the process, I acted as researcher, designer, and project manager. I communicated with our client consistently and produced presentations to share our research findings with them. 


Long days, but short weeks. Seemingly endless meetings. Teachers never have enough time. They feel drained and as if they can't always meet the needs presented to them by students, families, their administration, and colleagues.

Maro for Teachers provides valuable resources related to mental health and social emotional learning (SEL) to assist them with juggling both the needs of their students and their own learning.

The Goal

Design an efficient and effective way for teachers to view and use the resources available to them.

Deliverables

  • Research Reports (competitive/comparative analysis, personas,

    user interviews, affinity maps)

  • User Testing Reports

  • User Journey Maps, Flows, Sitemaps

  • Sketches, Wireframes, lo-fi and hi-fi clickable prototype


Overview

I had the privilege of designing a product that would make teacher’s lives easier and help them to:

  • Create, draft, and save lesson plans

  • Listen to Professional Development content

  • Share behavioral concerns with counselors and other school administrators 

  • Manage standard compliance with consent forms 

  • Communicate with families

To better understand how teacher’s live their day-to-day lives in and out of school and to learn what their needs might be, we began our explorative research by conducting 9 hour-long interviews through video calls. We crafted open-ended questions with opportunities for follow-up to drive our interviews that were developed to help the teachers feel comfortable.

Research

Insights

After conducting 9 interviews and 18 surveys we found that…

Competitive and Comparative Analysis Results

  • Most direct competitors had SEL focus

  • No mental health integration

  • Simple dashboards prevail

  • Need teacher engagement

  • Need simple/all-in-one resource

Using the insights from client and user interviews, we analyzed 6 competitors (direct and indirect) as well as compared 11 other companies which have similar task flows and goals to the contractors job.

Persona

Based on our research takeaways, we developed our Persona, Tina Teacher.

Ideation

Key Problem Statement:

How might we create a platform that helps teachers stay organized, has actionable SEL content, shows teacher appreciation, and is frictionless/easy to use?

Affinity Mapping: Affinity Grouping of Interview Data

Affinity Mapping

Empathy Map

Information Architecture: Sitemap

I led the creation of a sitemap using analyzed datasets to develop structure and organization to the platform.

Collaborative card sorting exercises assisted us in deciding which elements were most important when it came to scope and impact.

Crazy Eights Brainstorm

We sketched each task highlighted by the user flow. After we diverged, we converged to devise a combined solution for each task.

User Flows

The structure and information architecture being set in place meant it’s time to design the user flows. These are the paths that users take in order to complete an action within the product. We decided to create the paths most relevant to our design challenge. We created three user flows: accessing the PD content, accessing the Lesson Plan Library, and accessing the

Sketches • Wireframes • Rapid Prototyping

After creating the user flows, we took to sketching, rapid prototyping and more testing based off of flows relevant to our persona’s needs.

Low-fidelity prototype

We created a mid-fidelity prototype based on insights gained via user research and the goals of the client.

Maroʻs brand colors are yellow and white, but we experimented with other color palettes. We wanted to take into consideration that yellow can be difficult when it comes to accessibility.

A simple log in/sign up page was created. Based on our user interviews, teachers are very busy and need the most simple sign on process possible.

The dashboard design was inspired by our persona. We made some big changes to Maroʻs existing features. Emphasis was placed on the Impact section, as teachers shared this was something meaningful to them. We also added a section dedicated to counselor interactions and future appointments with counselors.

The Counselor Connect feature was created as teachers shared it was important for them to be in touch with counselors on a consistent basis. Teachers are able to schedule an appointment or start a chat with a counselor.

We learned so much about Professional Development (PD) from our conversations with teachers. We discovered that it can be hard to fit all the learning teachers want to have into their very busy days. The PD dashboard makes it easy for teachers to navigate and find what topics they wish to learn about.

An interactive lesson plan page was created. The existing Maro lesson plan page highlighted drafting traditional lesson plans. Via our conversations with teachers, we learned that many of them use paper planners or agendas for their lesson planning. For this prototype, we added a lesson community for teachers to share lessons that they had created with other teachers also using Maro.

Validation

Goal: How quickly and efficiently can the user complete their required tasks?

Usability Testing

  • 5 User Testing (remote) interviews

  • Overall usability rating on a 5:5 scale: 4.5 average

Teachers wished for...

  • lesson plan feature adjustments as some may use it, some may not

  • wanted calendar/lesson plan/chat function on dashboard for ease of use

  • alert feature should be accessible via phone

Teachers werenʻt sure about…

  • rewards feature- meaning and purpose

  • classroom tools feature could be duplicating their efforts as teachers

  • these tools/PD being solely for SEL purposes

Teachers loved…

  • easy sign on process

  • visuals

  • found rewards system incentivizing

  • podcasts

  • google calendar integration

Final Design

Next steps…

Our teamʻs research with teachers via our initial user interviews and the trial of usability testing, we have pertinent next steps for Maro to consider pursuing with further iterations…

  • Create a phone app to compliment the desktop app

    • This will make the app more accessible for teachers, especially for features like the PD Podcasts and the Alert Button.

  • Add a way for teachers to log student behaviors within the Maro App

    • This is often a part of the Evaluation process (data collection/behavior logging for evaluation process for special ed. services and for other interventions), so it would be helpful for teachers.

  • Beta Test to learn more.

    • Teacher’s needs vary from school to school. We recommend further investigation overall to learn more through continued interacting with teachers via a beta test.

Reflection

The Maro project provided the opportunity to practice the design thinking process and create a digital product that addresses a critical issue in education. I gained experience in conducting user research, creating personas, and designing for a specific target audience. Overall, the project taught me the importance of empathy and collaboration in the design process.