HEARD
A private social network for teachers and parents, already live in six schools. One of three startups I worked with during Tradecraft, a product design bootcamp.
HEARD's founding team asked for help improving their existing product while they pursued a Series A. The process was research, synthesize, then develop design principles, starting with interviews with parents about their current process, using an interview guide to keep sessions consistent and pull out comparable feedback.
We organized that feedback into affinity groups to find patterns worth acting on rather than one-off complaints.
With those findings in hand, we started with onboarding, targeting signups (activation), engagement, and continued use (retention), moving from lo-fi wireframes to hi-fi once the client signed off on the direction. In parallel, we addressed several specific points of confusion in the core app's navigation and feed that research had turned up and that were relatively easy to fix.