CASE STUDY
Mindfulness Labs — Education & Social Impact
Creating a mobile app where teachers can manage lesson plans, collaborate with peers, and communicate with parents. All centered around equal education practices.
Creating collaborative spaces for greater impact
Effective to Great Education’s aims to inform teachers and partnership schools on how they can integrate SEL practices into their lesson plans and curriculums. Mindfulness Labs is their engaging curriculum program for elementary schools.
The Company
Effective to Great Education is an Ed-Tech startup using Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to support vulnerable students in underserved communities. The founder, Laura Thomas, helps integrate cultural-trauma focused SEL lessons into school curriculums.
My Role
UX Designer — Research, visual design, client liaison, client presentation
Problem
As ETGE expands and takes on new clients, they need a more efficient way for their partnered schools to access Mindfulness Labs lesson plans and continue to connect with students through SEL resources.
Solution
Mindfulness Labs, a mobile application for teachers and student guardians. The app will act as a database for pre-made ETGE lesson plans and allow for users to customize their own plans for inside and outside of the classroom.
Project Overview
Client Constraints
ETGE had two feature “must-haves” for Mindfulness Labs: (1) SEL lesson plan database where users could search through ETGE’s established lesson plans and (2) lesson plan customization, allowing users to break apart pre-made lesson plans into smaller activities they can then combine into their own plans.
3 week timeline
Users
Teachers from kindergarten to 8th grade
Parents and guardians of students from kindergarten to 8th grade
Design Artifacts
Diving into cultural responsiveness and SEL teaching, we conducted user interviews with teachers ranging from kindergarten to 8th grade to get their perspectives on forming lesson plans and their schools’ curriculums. We performed multiple competitive analysis exercises to understand what features were imperitive, in addition to ETGE’s requests. Through teacher and guardian user personas, user stories, journey mapping and task analysis we were able to prioritize what pain points needed addressing, while balancing client needs.
Research Summary
Ideation + Wireframing
When building on the visual design, we wanted to maintain a playful, endearing tone as the application was geared towards teachers and guardians for elementary school students. With the amount of content categories there were for activities and lesson plans, we decide to color code each SEL category as an additional grouping method (aside from the main search filter) for users to lean on. Our color coding/visual style was our most consistently positive feedback from user testing!
Visual Style
Typography
Icons + Navigation
Colors + Elements
