NAME PRONUNCIATION
Helping schools create an inclusive community
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Project Description
Feature work for Blackbaud's Education Management SIS product
Research Methods
Competitive analysis, User discovery, Usability testing
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Contribution
I led all aspects of design and research and collaborated with product and engineering leads. My responsibilities included helping define scope, design ideation, usability testing, defining success metrics, and communicating the design to key stakeholders at Blackbaud.
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THE GIST
Our software experience failed to capture a key aspect of a student’s identity: how to pronounce their name. This gap in functionality made it possible for our users to have students to feel unvalued and excluded from the school community. We conducted a competitive analysis and user discovery in order to identify how to best address this problem. Our efforts resulted in an in-product tool where students can record their name and have that shared throughout the system for all school personnel to leverage, marking one step forward on the journey for students to feel seen and understood.
THE PROBLEM
“I was working with a new student and was talking with him, calling him by his name. Months later, I met his parents where they started talking about their son and I immediately realized that I had been mispronouncing this student’s name for months and the student never said anything. I felt terrible.”
My team and I heard this brief story from an advisor at a high school and were all struck by a shared understanding of how we might feel if we were in the student’s shoes - to have a key part of your identity misunderstood and misconstrued.
THE CHALLENGE
How might we help our schools cultivate an inclusive community that demonstrates the importance and value of each community member?
Our schools want to achieve an outcome where every student and individual in the school feels seen and understood. Our challenge is to figure out how we can contribute to that journey.
THE PROCESS
Our focus was constrained to the initial gap identified: not knowing how to pronounce an individual’s name. Other efforts to address additional aspects of building an inclusive community branched off from this work.
RESEARCH & COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
To understand the scope of this problem space, our initial research efforts centered around three main themes:
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How has this problem been solved before?
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What do our users need?
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How might other Blackbaud products benefit from this solution?
How has this problem been solved before?
Looking at the competitive landscape, we analyzed how different experiences presented name recordings across the space - NameCoach, LinkedIn - to see if there were industry standards we should leverage. We also wanted to widen our research net to include recording processes in general, looking at things like the voice recorder app from Apple.
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What do our users need?
​Knowing that our approach would be iterative, we needed to better understand users’ needs and priorities from our system to define an MVP (in this case, defining it as Minimum Valuable Product) solution. We conducted several discovery sessions with users to answer these questions and glean insights.
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How might other Blackbaud products benefit from this solution?
Blackbaud serves a global market in the social good space with solutions ranging from fundraising tools to CRM. As we began to explore what a feature like this could mean for the Education space, we also wanted to understand the value that might exist in other verticals in order to consider those needs.
EXPLORATION
To ensure a well-informed solution, we integrated our exploration with continuous discovery, focusing on how we could deliver a valuable experience to schools.
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Iteration and user testing: Building on the insights gathered from both the competitive analysis and user discovery, we initiated a cycle of iteration and user testing. I used Sketch and Invision to create a desktop interactive prototype that allowed us to refine our concepts and gather direct user feedback.
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Defining MVP: As we continued to learn and iterated, we finalized our definition of MVP, focusing our solution on key users and product areas.
THE SOLUTION
Our research-driven solution implemented industry standard patterns for recording and focused on key product area identified by users. Our solution focused on the process of how a recording would be captured and where that recording would be most valuably surfaced.
Adding a recording
Listening to a recording on a student's record
THE MEASUREMENT PLAN
As development wrapped up on this work, we introduced data tracking on key actions (add recording, delete recording, play recording) in order to understand adoption of this new feature.
We are evaluating the overall experience through the lens of the HEART framework. Once adoption and usage grows, we will create a survey to evaluate user satisfaction and gather feedback for potential future updates.
Key questions
Please rate the name pronunciation tool in terms of the following statements (1- strongly disagree, 5- strongly agree)
The name pronunciation tool's features meet my needs.
The name pronunciation tool is easy to use.
THE IMPACT
We’re continuing to listen for feedback and understand how this feature is making a difference towards the goal of making sure our users feel known and understood. We know there may be more to do, but we’re excited to know that we’re moving in the right direction.
- Blackbaud Client
“Huge win for us at [our school] as the care of then individual is our center focus.”