I was hired by ALC schools to start their research and design practice from scratch. The big reason for my hire was a planned name change and design change that the company’s executives and marketing team wanted to implement in order to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and a company that owned us previously.
Up to this point, all of the companies design work had been done either by contractors or by the development team. Most of the design work that had been done had also been done years previously. The result was an app that looked dated and had sizeable user experience gaps.
For the first six months on the job, one of my big focuses was redesigning our primary suite of iOS and Android Applications used by our driver’s parents and service providers to get students to and from school in private vehicles. Our most-used application was our Driver App, which drivers use to see their assigned trips and navigate to and from a student’s house and school.
I directed my small team as we worked to redesign the driver application into something that was modern and highly usable. We also had to work within the context of the new visual branding guidelines before assigned, which didn’t take into account many digital use cases and lacked accessibility considerations.
By basing our new layouts on Google’s material design system, we were able to quickly and efficiently set up our own design system that allowed us to create and collaborate with our development, product, and marketing teams. In less than six months we had completed our field research, designed and iterated new applications, supported our development team during their engineering efforts, and deployed our new applications to the Apple and Android app stores.
Not only were the new applications vastly improved from a usability and user interface perspective, but they also had big business impact. Our app store ratings increased by 1.3 stars across both app stores, and the quantitative metrics we were tracking around on time pickups, on time drop-offs, call center engagement, and other business considerations all drastically improved with the release of the new application.
Work Done
- Stakeholder interviews new lines
- User interviews
- Low fidelity mock ups
- Midfidelity markups
- High fidelity mockups
- Interactive prototypes
- In person usability testing
- Remote usability testing
- Development support
- Post deployment quantitative data review
- Post deployment user interviews