Welcome app Dashboard
Contains: UX | Information architecture
Skills: UX research | Wireframing | Prototyping
Graduation: Welcome app Amsterdam
In short
For my graduation project at Welcome app, I had the opportunity to delve into the realm of user research and design, focusing on a specific group of users: language schools in Dordrecht. The objective was to create a collaborative dashboard that would enable these language schools to establish meaningful partnerships and foster better connections. Which in turn would lead to more refugees being able to communicate with their new environment.
Conducting extensive user research was the foundation of my project. I gained invaluable insights into the unique needs and challenges faced by language schools in Dordrecht. The main challenge was that the school at large wished for a way to collaborate but felt repelled to share information with other school out of a fear for rivalry. Armed with this knowledge, I embarked on the creation of a user-friendly dashboard that would act as a entry-level model and facilitate the process of getting to know one another.
The dashboard I designed provided a platform for language schools to refer students to one another, fostering a stronger sense of community and cooperation. The project was met with enthusiasm from both the language schools and the team at Welcome app, affirming the relevance and impact of user-centered design in real-world applications. You can read my documentation here.
Challenges & Insights
The language schools are in a bit of an odd situation. There are many factors contributing to a stare down in which the language schools need to reference to one another but are also rivals. These factors include:
- Many refugees dont think the mendatory language course upon arrival is enough to start living here.
- The motivation to learn the language more comes from the refugees themselves but falls off when they arrive at a language school that can not help them.
- The language school have to identify the language level of a student before they can allow them into a course. If the level does not match the school they are often send away.
- The schools are mostely unaware of the amount of competition they have within the city
- Most schools work with volunteers and can not scale up on short notice
- Schools are hesitant the share information.
This makes that in the design I had to be very delicate with what information I could provide and what not. The more information I would need from the schools the less of them would be willing to use my sollution. Making it less valueable. The main challenge turned out to be: How can I get the schools to refer and collaborate with each other without them feeling a negative rivalry?
Sollution
All the language school had one thing in common, they already used the welcome app to get into contact with refugees. Because of this I could use the information they gave to welcome to at the very least get an overview of each other within the city of Dordrecht. This was already a big plus since Google Maps only showed 4 out of the 26 language schools. This overview not only helped with the referring, but also helped schools to plan a strategy for the future.
To ensure less rivalry the schools can opt into the usage of the dashboard. However, for those willing to give up some information the reward is receiving information in return. The system keeps track of how active schools are on the platform and if a school does not add information to the platform they will not be able to receive the benefits of referral from other language schools.
Due to the delicate nature and lack of time due to this being a graduation project I decided together with Welcome app and the language schools to use this dashboard as an entry-level model which evolves with the language schools as they get more accustomed this way of collaboration.
