04 — General Assembly · 2020
A platform that takes care of admin. So you can engage.
Parents weren't using the app. Not because they didn't want to — because calling was easier.
Maths Words Not Squiggles provides tailored maths and English tutoring to primary and high school students. They had an existing portal. Parents just weren't opening it.
Our challenge was to design a platform so frictionless that parents would actually want to use it — one that took care of the admin so they had energy left over to genuinely engage with their child's learning.
Why would I use the platform if I can just call?
— MWNS parent, user interview
Understanding the landscape
We started with secondary research — a competitive analysis of Seesaw, ClassDojo, and other parent-facing education apps. Both Seesaw and ClassDojo succeeded because they kept parents informed without requiring effort. Feedback appeared automatically, not on request.
We then interviewed 12 parents — 8 current MWNS clients and 4 from other tutoring services — to understand what they actually needed, and why the existing portal kept losing to a phone call.
The original app buried progress reports three taps deep. We surfaced them on the home screen. If parents can see their child's evaluation the moment they open the app, they actually read it — and engagement follows naturally.
7 out of 8 parents needed to reschedule lessons regularly. The old flow buried it behind multiple screens and ambiguous labels. We made it the primary action on the lesson card — visible without scrolling, done without calling.
The original booking screen showed every available slot in a wall of times — overwhelming and slow. Parents told us they searched by tutor first, then availability. We flipped the flow to match their mental model.
An MVP parents would actually open. Built and tested in 2 weeks.
We delivered a fully tested, mobile-first responsive web app across three redesigned flows. Rescheduling went from a phone call to a single tap. Progress tracking became something parents sought out, not something they had to chase.
The solution was grounded in 12 parent interviews and two rounds of usability testing. Every decision came back to the same question: does this make the admin easier, or does it just move the friction somewhere else?
"A platform that's easy to use so we can focus on teaching."
— Sia Goutzas, MWNS