Timeline: January-April 2023
Team: 4 UX Designers
My Role: Team Lead, UX Design, UI Design, User Research
Client: Maro
Project: Mobile iOS app redesign
Implementing Content Strategy for an EdTech Mobile App
About Maro
Maro, an EdTech startup, launched the Maro Parents app in 2020 to help families navigate pediatric mental illness. Despite over 2,000 downloads, the app only had 1-4 daily active users as of January 2023.
Challenge
Maro asked my team to redesign Maro Parents to boost engagement and secure the investor support needed to continue refining their product.
Result
Maro is using our more intuitive design and user research to showcase planned improvements. In April 2023, Maro won a prize of $250k at the GSV Cup 2023, the world's largest pitch competition for EdTech startups.
This case study does a deep dive on the content strategy I implemented during the redesign and provides a brief summary of other redesigned app sections at the end. To learn more about the UI design, click here.
RESEARCH
Heuristic Evaluation
First, we looked at the current app to understand why Maro Parents had such poor user engagement metrics. In terms of the app’s content, the main opportunities improvement included:
Consistency and standards: Adding search bar and filter options to improve the experience of discovering content.
Accessibility: Creating images with high contrast ratios between the text and the background and generally adhering to WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.
“I’m constantly reading articles, blogs, scientific journals…to figure out what’s best for my kid.”
— Emma
Understanding Parents
We conducted 1:1 interviews with 6 parents to understand their needs and how parents approach health challenges with their children. Through user interviews, we discovered that:
Parents are avid researchers and value expert-written parenting advice and child information.
Parents value personalized content.
Parents lean on communities for support and to feel less alone in their parenting journey.
Snapshot of affinity diagram from user interviews (February 2023).
Client Feedback
After presenting our research findings to the client, they asked if we could add a community aspect to the app even though they don’t have the budget for full-scale community moderation.
As a result, I volunteered to look for ways to implement a “community feel” throughout the app to side-step the need for moderation while providing the supportive environment parents are looking for.
Design Direction
Based on the above insights and client feedback, I decided to focus the new designs on emphasizing that Maro’s content is scientifically accurate, personalized, and supportive.
Content Redesign at a Glance
Reimagined Explore Tab
Search for and filter through content with newly incorporated common design patterns.
Discover new content by browsing content categories.
Scannable Articles
Read the “Key takeaways” summary at the top of every article if there isn’t enough time to read the whole thing. Share or save the article to read later.
Ask the Experts
Vote on and submit questions to get answered by the experts behind all of Maro’s content.
Reinforced Trust
Get to know the experts Maro works with and feel confident learning from the content they produce for Maro Parents.
EARLY CONCEPTS
Sketches and Wireframes
Drawing design inspiration from a wide variety of apps including Flo, Apple News, Spotify, and Facebook Groups I started blocking out ideas to discover what categories are most important to include, what filtering options I would need, what parts of a typical online community are essential, and how all of these screens would interact with each other.
Exploring Modules/Articles home screen layout options, identifying filters and how screens would interact
Exploring how community and content go hand-in-hand and what it would mean to have no community moderation
The New Bottom Navigation
Early on in the discovery phase, I noticed that the original app navigation needed a few changes to better reflect the type of content Maro Parents has to offer.
A key change I suggested that ended up in the final designs was splitting up the articles and modules, originally found in the Explore tab, into different tabs because they require different levels of time/emotional commitment.
Result: I kept articles in the Explore tab and created a new tab just for modules called “Learn.”
Original app bottom navigation
Bottom navigation redesign: Early sketches
Bottom navigation redesign: Late sketches
Bottom navigation redesign: Mid-fidelity
Bottom navigation redesign: High Fidelity
“We want a community but we don’t have the budget for moderation.”
— Client
Designing a “Community Feel”
I wanted to help parents feel less alone when using Maro Parents by embedding a “community feel” within the app that would adhere to the client’s budget constraints and not require moderation.
To tackle this opportunity, I worked backwards from what an ideal community would be by using Facebook groups and the What to Expect app as inspiration.
This lead me to design a section called “Expert FAQ,” where parents ask Experts their questions instead of other parents. This way, parents still receive advice and learn from others’ challenges, but they are not interacting directly with other app users.
Working backwards: The ideal community
Working backwards: What if the community didn't allow users to respond to each other and instead they respond to questions determined by Maro?
Working backwards: What if community members submitted their own questions and then Maro provided the answers?
Presenting Initial Concepts to the Client
After finalizing initial sketches and concepts, my team and I presented these ideas to the client to get their feedback on our design choices and direction.
Key changes to the content portion of the app based on client feedback and preferences:
Moved browsable topics from the bottom of the Articles home screen to the top and refined topic options
Placed a “Featured'“ article category above the Recommended category
Created a broader community section called “Maro Talk” which contains Expert FAQs in addition to challenges because the client was concerned that FAQs would not be a strong enough section on its own
Explore Home, Articles tab concept sketches presented to the client
Explore Home, Articles tab wireframes created based on client feedback; Topics and categories were rearranged and refined
Expert FAQ concept sketches presented to the client
Expert FAQ/Maro Talk wireframes created based on client feedback; Client wanted a broader community-focused section called "Maro Talk" that would hold FAQs and Parent Challenges
Expert Bios, Sharing, Recommendations, & More
Other concepts I worked on during ideation that ended up in the final product were:
Bio pages for experts reinforce trust by providing parents with information about who wrote the content they’re consuming.
Like, Share, and Save actions to make content more interactive and help parents see that others are consuming the same information.
Scannable articles with well established hierarchy and “key takeaways” at the top help busy parents understand information when they’re short on time.
Recommended content on the Home Screen that changes based on information parents add to the app to create a personalized touch.
Pieces of wireframes screens that show Expert Bios, Like/Share/Save actions, Articles layout and recommendations on the Home screen
TESTING & ITERATIONS
Usability Testing Results
Expert Bios
During usability testing, we discovered that parents were generally happy to see the bio pages within the app, but wanted a bit more information about the experts. As a result, the final product provides parents with information about the expert’s education, parenting philosophy, experience, and more.
Maro Talk & Expert FAQs
We received a lot of positive feedback about the Expert FAQs, however, parents expressed general confusion towards Maro Talk. After sharing these results with the client, we agreed to expand on the FAQs by adding a voting capability and removing Maro Talk altogether.
The voting capability would provide the client with a foundational system that determines which submitted questions parents are most interested in receiving expert responses for, and help Maro understand what kind of content parents are most interested in.
Pivoting the Explore Tab Layout
Challenges
As I was creating new screens with the voting capability, I ran into a few issues because I tried to stick to my original layout of the Explore tab split into different sections based on content type (Articles and Expert FAQs).
This made it difficult to add the voting action because I was now juggling two subsections within the Expert FAQs: Answered Questions and Unanswered Questions.
Solution
After many hours and many more iterations, I came to the conclusion that the Explore tab should be split into sections based on whether users are consuming content or contributing to content instead of by content type.
Result:
Articles and Expert-answered Questions are placed together within the Explore Home.
Added section: Community Questions - a section specifically made for voting on and submitting questions (content contribution).
A burger menu to navigate between sections to help parents easily switch between consuming content in the Explore Home and contributing to content in Community Questions.
Explore Home
Viewing Expert-answered Questions
Vote on/Submit Questions
How it Works
“I often find browsing in apps confusing, but I was happy to see how simply this was laid out.”
— Danielle
PROJECT OUTCOMES
The Rest of the Redesign
In addition to content strategy, I also helped create the redesign onboarding, modules, and the journaling feature.
Comprehensive Onboarding
Engaging, Actionable Modules
Simplified Journaling
Conclusion
Final Presentation & Next Steps
We presented our final designs and a clickable prototype to the Maro team during our last meeting. The client was very happy with the visual style of the app, it’s functionality and enhanced features, and the research we provided to backup design decisions.
After development of the new MVP, we suggested tracking average monthly and daily users to understand if app engagement improved with the new designs.
Takeaways
I loved working with a client that was incredibly passionate about their product and invested in every part of the design process.
However, the 10 week time constraint of this project really affected how much work my team could do for the client. As team leader, I had to learn how to both prioritize tasks for the team and articulate to the client that certain features, tasks, or research were just not feasible within such a short amount of time.
Since we could not design everything the client would need in 10 weeks, we provided the client with in-depth documentation on not only how the screens work and interact with each other, but also on the bigger picture of how the designs could scale as the business grows, what the app could look like once they have a higher level of user engagement, and the initial steps they would need to take to get there.