About
Rocky Mountain Prep is a network of public charter schools with multiple campuses in the Denver Metro area. It has become one of Denver’s highest-performing elementary charter school networks.
Challenge
Their success in the classroom needed a modern online platform to convey that message to a variety of stakeholders, consisting of current parents, potential parents, a board of directors, investors, state regulators, and potential new staff members. Rocky Mountain Prep needed an improved user experience that was, mobile-friendly, easy to maintain with scalability for future growth. Most importantly their student body is comprised of various ethnic backgrounds and inclusivity was a key point.
Roles
Research, Ideation, Personas, Sitemap, User-flow, User-Experience, Art Direction, Custom Design, Wireframing, Responsive UI design (Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile), Interactive Prototyping
Solution
Researched various educational institutions across the country to identify recurring solutions and key methods that worked in the education sector. I then reviewed and utilized the results to create an improved streamlined sitemap, interface, and user journey to ensure the user experience met the requirements of all our stakeholder groups. To address the Mobile experience the site was designed as a responsive site that allows us to flow seamlessly from desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints while maintaining the same look and feel throughout the site. With this solution, the Rocky Mountain Prep team only needs to input content in one place. The design language was created with future expansion in mind, this will allow them to easily add campuses as they become needed without the need to invest in additional design work or heavy development work.
With the variety of Rocky Mountain Preps stakeholders (Personas), it was important to identify the needs each group had and ensure that each group had access to the information they needed. The stakeholders and user groups are;
1. Current Students
With language barriers young students many times assist in translation, navigating, and sourcing information on the site for their parents. Usage includes finding important events in the calendar and important news to name a few.
2. Current Parents
With busy schedules, parents need to easily find information for their child's campus to keep up with important alerts, schedule, report their child's absence, and more.
3. Potential Parents
Researching parents whose children are entering school for the first time or parents who are unsatisfied with the performance of their current school. An extremely important target audience to Rocky Mountain Prep and their growth aspirations.
4. Potential New Staff Members
Rocky Mountain Prep is a great school to work for and features many benefits that other school districts do not offer. To attract the best talent I created a section that highlights all the benefits of the school, community, and lifestyle in and around the Denver Metro area.
5. Board Members
Needed access to a variety of data that is required by law, along with various other information that needs to be readily available not only for board members but the general public. The content needed to visually fit into the site but not be a nuisance to the student and parent users.
To ensure accessibility to families of various ethnic groups Google Translate was implemented on the site. Users can easily identify Google Translate in the header and select their language allowing them to navigate the site in their own language.
Impact
• Delivered a modern up to date site with an improved user experience that addresses the needs of 5 different stakeholder groups.
• Fully responsive site with an intuitive mobile experience.
• With Google Translate parents can rely less on their elementary-age children to source important information and they can navigate the site in their native tongue. Ensuring all parents and students have access.
• Created a solution to attract the best teachers to the best school network in Colorado to ensure they can grow with great teachers from across the United States.
• UI was designed to ensure Rocky Mountain Prep is scalable with the ability to easily add additional campuses as they are needed.
Deliverables
Mind Map
Persona
User Flow
Styleguide
Desktop Prototype