top of page

Elevate

Brief description & objective: As the final part of the MSc Innovation & Entrepreneurship course at the University of Bristol, I had to develop a new entrepreneurial project. Being passionate about education and child development, I was determined to use this as an opportunity to innovate in this space. I shared this passion with my fellow colleagues in the course and found two other like-minded individuals who were just as enthusiastic as I was. We did not view this project as an academic dissertation, but as a chance to obtain feedback from industry professionals that would be valuable in helping us to launch the project as an actual business and agreed to set high goals and push for excellence. 

 

Thus, our journey to develop Elevate began. Our aim is to help millennial parents develop essential skills in their children so that they would excel in their future study and work. 

​

How might we statement: How might we empower Asian parents as co-educators of their children's skills development? 

 

Project duration: May 2022 to Present

​

My responsibilities:

  • Carried out secondary research

  • Interviewed experts and target users

  • Conducted market research and competitor analysis

  • Brainstormed ideas

  • Designed personas and user journey map

  • Co-created UX/UI and visual design

​

Approach and process:

We utilised a blend of design thinking, lean start-up and agile methodology to innovate a solution that would be feasible, viable and desirable to the target market (Pinder. n.d.).

1) Design thinking: We used design thinking double-diamond model as an approach to ensure we think divergently before converging so that we view the problem from different perspectives, enabling us to approach the problem creatively, while maintaining a focus through converging and synthesising. Thus, we explored the problem areas, narrowed the focus, generated ideas, and decided the final topic. 

After pivoting, we came up with three possible solutions. 

Solution 1: A day planner white board for parents and children to plan their day together using activity magnets provided. 

​

​

Solution 2: An app to complement Solution 1. It includes a library of activities and a dashboard to track skill-development progress.

Solution 3: A short-video platform for families to watch, follow and create fun skill-development activities. There will be ‘challenges’ to encourage participation.

2) Lean start-up: We applied the lean startup principle of build-measure-learn to conduct rapid cycles of testing in terms of feasibility, variability and desirability and iterating ideas.

First, we sketched the low-fidelity prototypes to test the desirability of our concept with expert and target users. We validated our concept was desirable and collected some feedbacks for improvement.

 

Next, we built personas to identify use cases for our products (Belyh 2019) to empathy with the users, so we understand their needs better. We then used tools such as the value proposition canvas (Strategyzer 2020a), the business model canvas (Strategyzer 2020b) and the lean canvas (Maurya2012) to iterate our business model and decide our minimum viable product (MVP), which would be the Elevate app including a library of activities, multimedia activities guide, skill-development milestones checklists, and community feed.

 

We then built user journey map and high-fidelity prototypes to test with users through interviews and surreys to see whether they could understand the values we deliver, whether they like our solutions and whether they would pay for it.

3) Agile methodology: we adopted agile methodology throughout our journey. Each step (below) was conducted in mini-sprints where we went through cycles of planning, executing and evaluating (Wrike n.d.). This was especially useful when using the lean startup approach because our team could be more responsive to feedback from rapid tests (Wrike n.d.). The agile tools and methodswe utilised include (GOV.UK. 2019) sprint meetings, team wall and weekly stand-up meeting. 

My responsibilities: User journey map, persona, the Elevate app prototypes (shown below).

1. The user journey map

2. Persona

3. The Elevate app prototypes

Our team decided to design the UX/UI of the Elevate app as our high-fidelity prototype. I am responsible for building the following screens. 

​

1) The landing page and log in

2) The Feed for parents to search and share topics about parenting tips, skills development and activates.

3) The Gallery for parents to record the moments of their children doing activities

4) The store to sell tool kits that created by us or affiliated products and experiential activities. 

Click to see the prototype of the Elevate app

Next steps: We will test with more users, iterate our projects according to the feedbacks and our dissertation supervisor, and then seek for funding. 

​

What I learned: There were some improvements need to be made for future development. First, I found that the high-fidelity prototypes contain too much information when I conducted interviews to test with parents. It was hard for parents to understand all the content within limit time, and we did not get feedback that were valuable to us because the overload of content was too distracting. Thus, I learned that we need to prioritise the information and test with MVP first for more effective feedback. I also searched for principles in high-fidelity prototypes design. I realized that high-fidelity prototypes are not the end product. They are flexible, modular, and reusable, which help with gathering essential feedback and effective iteration (Tan 2022). In addition, our supervisor suggested to conduct physical prototype testing, which is more attractive and give user a tangible sense of feeling of our products. One idea we came up with since receiving that feedback was to do a pilot test of the activities with parents and their children. This idea will be included in our next step testing.

 

Knowing the importance of effective design and testing, I have since joined several design communities to access useful resources and learned from experienced designers. 

References ​

bottom of page