The Question.

How do we create a software that can change education?



Startclass is an application that challenges the way we approach the future of education by starting with revolutionizing the way we approach Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS).

For years, education has been left on the sideline. Meanwhile, healthcare, Facebook pages, cars, phones, and many other industries continue to receive meaningful updates year after year — but now all of that changes.

Business

01

Market Analysis.

The global education market is currently valued over $6T with a projected value of $8T by the year 2025. That means in the next 5 years the market is expected to grow 33.3% in total value. Worldwide education technology spend is over $150B with that number projected to jump to $342B by 2025. In the United States alone, there are over 56M students and 120M parents. The average spend per student per year is $11,762 with $400 accounting for ed-tech expenditures.

02

Competitive Applications.

A number of applications exist both in the LMS and SIS space (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Powerschool) for institutions to choose from, as well as, a myriad of platforms for communication (e.g. Remind, ClassDojo, Bloomz, Campuswire).

03

Our Advantage.

Our first advantage is our holistic approach to ed-tech. By focusing on the education industry as a whole, it allows us to tackle more aspects of education and build strong brand recognition with our customers as opposed to only providing a single solution. Building a successful product means approaching schools as opposed to teachers. Countless models approach from the bottom-up which explains marginal growth. Most importantly, we are user-focused. Companies who design and focus products based around the user experience 4x the revenue, 5x the cost savings, 6x time to market, and 26x the valuation over none user-focused companies. Ane yes, we do have some secret sauce too ;).

Research

01

Problems With Communication.

After polling over 700 respondents, we found some interesting statistics about the state of communication within schools, districts, and universities. 98% of respondents felt that institutions could improve their outward communication. Another poll revealed that 62% of university students felt that their university does not communicate upcoming events effectively.

02

Persona Development.

Startclass uses 6 personas to help us better empathize with our users and their needs. Each persona breaks down the targeted users' personality, traits, pain points, and more. These personas were developed after conducting interviews and other research.



03

Articles & Resources.

The History and Problems of Standardized Testing

UX & UI

01

The Problem Statement.

Schools need an application that helps keep parents, students, teachers, and admins engaged with the educational journey of each student. Parents have too many communication applications because teachers choose what communication platform they would like to use for their application. Students do not feel like they are kept up-to-date with the latest from their school. Admins want a way to easily communicate objectives with their constituents.

02

The Solution.

A single application that provides a versatile toolset for schools to build their communication channels the way they want, and an engaging platform for students and parents to stay up-to-date on the latest class, school, and district updates.

03

Wireframes.



04

Flow Charts.

These charts are a great way of breaking down single process flows to generate numerous amounts of use cases and edge cases. It also provides an easy way for developers to logically progress through the flow.



05

THE UI.



Design

01

Some Colors.


#665EFF

Lavender


#3ACCE1

Aqua


#9AE659

Kiwi


#FFB900

Sunshine


#FF4F4F

Coral


#E6E9ED

Pod

02

The Mark.

Startclass' logo exemplifies one of the company's core values of simplicity which is really what education is meant to be. Not flashy or over the top — more down-to-earth and approachable, yet strikingly professional.



03

Styles & Components.

A style guide and component library are one of the easiest ways to ensure thoughtful and consistent design standards across an application. This leads to more of an atomic design approach where each component represents an atom.



04

Accessibility.

When designing an application, maintaining accessibility is key to providing a fantastic app experience for all users. Startclass boasts an impressive and consistent record of passing both AA (normal text) and AAA (large text) across the application as well as contrast colors for various elements. The UI elements are also very friendly to those who are colorblind: deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia. The web application will be looking forward to making everything keyboard accessible and have tags for text to speech.

Social Media

01

Customizing Target Demographics.

Running efficient ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all start with creating very targeted demographics. Using the personas that were developed earlier along with other research, Startclass is able to target a specific demographic which leads to better engagement.

Male

Female

18 - 25

Student

University of Arkansas

Texas A&M University

University of Oklahoma

02

Posts.

We all love a good story.

03

Data and Analytics.

The ROI when running an ad campaign is to have your targeted users take a specific action. Perhaps it's purchasing a product, following the respective social media account, sharing the post, entering a contest, and so on. With each post, it is important to set KPIs to make it easier to evaluate the success of the campaign. Setting a goal provides valuable insights to understanding how your target demographic interacts with different social media posts and hopefully provides direction for future iterations.

Notes

01

Other roles and tasks.

A major part of my role was building a fun team dynamic, facilitate productive meetings, and organize our Kanban board. This small part of the day has always been such a highlight because it reminds me of how thankful I am to be working with such a talented team on a product that drives meaningful change for parents, students, teachers, and admins.

My favorite role was planning our upcoming features and setting priorities. This provided a great opportunity for me to talk to school leaders and hear about the pain points that they are facing and then working together to find meaningful solutions for them.

Another role that I had was managing our sales pipeline and create the KPIs for selling our product (SaaS / B2B) to customers. We used a variety of tools like Hubspot, Google Suite, and Hunter.io to gain meaningful insights into how potential customers were interacting with our content.

02

Tech Stack.

We chose React Native and Firebase to manage and launch our MVP. A few reasons swayed us to choose these two to start our stack. React Native because of the ambidexterity across mobile operating systems, and two, under the assumption of using React has our front-end for our web app, this would allow us to save time and avoid technical debt because of how React Native translates to React. Firebase was an easy decision for us to make because of the many tools the platform already provides in addition to the scalability of its backend.

03

Reflection.

Startclass has taught me valuable skillsets that had I stuck to a traditional product design role would have never taught me. Education has and always will be a passion of mine. It's been so exciting to watch this application grow and see schools, parents, students, teachers, and admins be excited about our solution. Here's to seeing where we go next. ✌️

🔥 Designed and coded by me © 2024