For the "Our Dancing School" app, primary research involves direct interviews with students and parents. This is essential for uncovering their specific frustrations with the current online system, particularly regarding slow enrollment and unclear class availability.
It validates the need for a parent portal, directly informing how to streamline the booking process and enhance transparency. This first-hand insight ensures the app's improvements are truly user-centred, leading to a quicker, easier enrolment experience.
Persona:
Jonar is a 17-year-old high school dance student from Manchester, UK, aspiring to become a professional dancer.
paper wireframes are vital for rapidly sketching and iterating on the core course viewing and quick enrollment flows. They force a focus on essential functionality, ensuring users can easily view information and enroll quickly without visual distractions.
This low-fidelity method allows for immediate team collaboration and feedback, enabling us to quickly test assumptions about "enrollment time" metric. By making it easy to discard flawed ideas early, paper wireframes save time and resources, ensuring the fundamental user experience for course discovery and enrollment is solid before digital development begins.
Wireframes facilitate early iteration and problem-solving, making it cost-effective to identify and fix usability issues. They serve as a common language for development teams and stakeholders, ensuring clear communication and alignment. By focusing purely on user experience, wireframes help build intuitive and user-centered products from the ground up, acting as a crucial guide for the entire development process.
Dancing App: Key UX Recommendations
To enhance the "Our Dancing School" app's user experience, several key improvements are recommended based on user testing. Firstly, clarify terminology and navigation, ensuring consistent labels for actions like 'sign-up', 'log-in', and 'enrol', and ensuring all interactive elements function as expected.
Secondly, improve class search and discovery. This involves enhancing search functionality with robust filters (e.g., by time or genre) and considering new sections like an "event gallery" for better course visibility.
Thirdly, refine the enrollment process. Clearly separate profile creation from class enrollment, and integrate a transparent payment flow allowing users to choose methods.
Finally, prioritise a dedicated parent portal for features like progress tracking and calendar integration, addressing specific user needs. Overall, focus on general visual clarity and an intuitive layout to ensure a seamless and efficient user journey from class discovery to enrollment.
A high-fidelity prototype for the "Our Dancing School" app is essentially a near-final, interactive version that looks and feels like the finished product. It features the exact colours, fonts, and layouts, with clickable elements mimicking the real app's functions.
In this scenario, its purpose is crucial for realistic user testing, allowing us to precisely measure how quickly students can enrol and easily view course information. We can observe interactions with the streamlined booking process and transparent class availability, identifying any remaining friction points before development. It also provides a tangible vision for stakeholders, like school management, clearly demonstrating the enhanced user experience, including the dedicated parent portal. This fosters strong buy-in and provides developers with a clear, detailed blueprint, ensuring the app is built exactly as designed to achieve our "quick and easy enrollment" goal.
