SOFT KIDS • Designing the teachers’ interface
00 • OVERVIEW
What is SOFT KIDS ?
SOFT KIDS is a French start up based in Paris whose purpose is to approach soft skills with children through gamification & edutainment, thanks to a digital app.
Nowadays, children are only prepared for hard skills at school and not so much for soft skills. For instance, empathy, ability to collaborate, self-confidence, creativity, critical thinking,…
« 85% of the professions of 2030 do not exist yet and soft skills are the essential abilities to prepare for them. »
This was acknowledged by Solenne Bocquillon-Le Goaziou, CEO & founder of SOFT KIDS and former HR director.
Challenge
Soft Kids is only available for kids & their parents so the app is composed of a double interface :
• A kid’s corner with programs, games, videos, rewards…
• A parents’ corner to follow the progress of the child(ren), with tips, items, etc…
Because SOFT KIDS now wants to establish at school, our goal in this project was to imagine from scratch the teachers’ interface, and to design the “Sign In” & “Log In” features of the mobile app, as well as a solution to collect pupils’ data after each exercise
Scope & Constraints
The timeline for this project was 9 working days (+2 week-end days) and we could work solo or in pairs. I decided to work with Charlotte Desaint because I love collaborating & I’m convinced that nothing great is ever accomplished alone.
Our role: UX & UI designer
Tools we used: Figma, Figjam, Trello, Pen & Paper
We organized our time from the beginning into sections thanks to Trello, by decomposing all the tasks we had to perform for this project in the allocated time.
The first 6 days were focused on UX (empathize, define & beginning of ideation stage), and the remaining 5 days mostly on UI (ideation, prototyping & testing iterations).
01 • RESEARCH & ANALYSIS
We began our research by establishing a CSD Matrix, which allowed us to record our assumptions and doubts. This greatly helped us in narrowing and directing our research goals.
➔ Secondary Research insights
There is a discrepancy between the school curriculum and the practices: soft skills teaching is part of the Education Nationale program since 2016. However, if they appear in school curricula, their teaching remains implicit: who is in charge of making them work? When do teachers need to to teach them? According to what progression? From what activities?
Teachers are not trained enough in new technologies & in teaching soft skills.
Equipment in French primary schools: mainly digital tablets.
The big majority of elementary school teachers in France are women: 84% of French primary school teachers in 2020/2021 were women.
Sources: lewebpedagogique.com & education.gouv.fr
➔ Business & competitors’ analysis
To better understand the market, we made a brand positionning map that showed us that there was a real gap in the market for soft skills on the B2B side (teachers & schools), as well as lots of apps for hard skills (learning how to read, how to count, …) but very few for soft skills and none on the B2B side.
We also conducted a visual competitors’ analysis that allowed us to be aware of what’s done regarding logging in & dashboards on the market : what tone, colors, ways of designing these parts of the app.
➔ User Interviews insights
We conducted 5 interviews with elementary school teachers to discover & better understand their needs. The main insights we received were that :
Even though our goal was to design a mobile app, we realized that teachers do not use their mobile phones at school. The brief changed after a talk with the client & we switched the device from mobile to tablet.
Any kind of support to teach soft skills/to have children practice them is welcome.
Teachers need the solution to be clear, simple and quick.
Thanks to an Affinity Map, we succedeed in clustering all our research findings in groups and drawing powerful insights : pain points and design opportunities.
02 • DEFINITION
Thanks to all these steps, Stéphanie, our user persona, was born.
Stéphanie is an elementary school teacher with more than 15 years of experience.
She is convinced that soft skills are necessary for children but she didn’t have any training about them. She uses a digital white board in class, but she doesn’t feel very comfortable with the digital world in general.
Problem Statement
SOFT KIDS is trying to expand, and the French government (Education Nationale) made an invitation to tender for the featuring of digital tools at school. So we came up with the following problem statement regarding the business side:
SOFT KIDS needs B2B funding sources and French government endorsement in order to attract new investors.
And, as explained earlier:
Primary school teachers NEED a clear and quick way to access their pupils’ progress & development in learning soft skills BECAUSE they know it is part of their role to teach them but they don’t know how to proceed and don’t have a lot of time.
03 • IDEATION
Solution & Value Proposition
Create a two entries app for teacher or pupil — here we focused only on the teacher part
Design a dashboard with clear, adapted info regarding the teacher audience
User Flow
We decided not to create only one flow, but two ! We had to cover teachers that already had an account, as well as new comers that wanted to sign in.
04 & 05 • PROTOTYPING & TESTING
During all the process, we used testing as a really powerful tool.
Our very first pen & paper low fidelity prototypes
Low & Mid-fidelity screens
In order to design our lo-fi prototype, we used the “crazy 8's” method in order to generate as many screen design ideas as possible.
We “concept tested” our lo-fi prototype version and then conducted some usability tests with several teachers after the first versions of mid-fi, and made numerous revisions and enhancements. I’ll explain the most important ones below.
Testing helped us with understanding teachers habits, and in particular that they would need to see the pupils’ progress at a glance.
At first, we had a different homepage (with the titles of the modules on one side, and the pupils of a class on the other) and we realized thanks to testing that teachers wanted to arrive straight on the dashboard. That’s why we decided to change the architecture of the app to that end.
We also tested the wordings. Some changes regarding UX writing were made: for instance, “Bibliothèque” became “Ressources”, “Statistiques” became “Tableau de Bord”, .. in order to be the most adapted possible to the teachers daily world. Regarding inclusivity, we changed “LE COIN DU PROF” by “LE COIN PROF” that didn’t give any clue about gender.
Last but not least, we made a lot of iterations on the “diagram screen” since it was not very clear how to assess soft skills & especially measure the progression of the soft skills by the children given that soft skills can not be evaluated strictly speaking.
Style Tile & User Interface Design
Let’s have a look at our style tile :
The challenge was to keep Soft Kids brand identity, but without the childish aspect present on the family version (and this was also based on research since teachers confirmed that they needed something straight to the point and not too “babyish”.
The only elements Solenne from SOFT KIDS was really attached to were the clouds. We decided to keep them and to color them in a special white we created on purpose, as well as in a dark blue. The light blue, pale green & pale yellow are also new colors, derivated from the original colors of the brand that we wanted to soften. We kept the dark blue & the red orange to make clear clickable areas and important actions, as well as to keep accessibility in mind.
High Fidelity Prototype
Or click here to open the prototype & play with it!
There are 2 scenarios to walk through it : log in and sign in
sign in: create account, create a class
log in: dashboard for general view, change module to see “vivre avec les autres”. Click on Léo to have his detailed table, click on the diagram for a different understanding : his glows and grows
Outcomes & lessons
This project was close to my heart because the subject of soft skills is essential to me in everyday life. I’m grateful because it allowed me to discover the French school reality in details & to emphasize with users, which is one of the things I like most as a UX/UI designer.
For this project, we won the Jury’s Honor Mentions, “for performing a great User-Centered Process” and for delivering an “amazingly designed Interface”.
Looking forward to the launching of the teachers’ app by SOFT KIDS!