Eduall
Connecting parents and tutors through an inclusive, flexible learning experience.
Although Eduall is presented here as a dedicated mobile app, it was designed as a scalable platform capable of supporting multiple roles and future surfaces.
The Problem
Parents struggle to find tutoring options that are flexible, inclusive, and easy to book — especially working parents, bilingual families, and those with children who have special learning needs. At the same time, tutors need simple tools to manage availability, lesson requests, and communication without friction. Designing for both roles within the same platform introduced additional complexity, often leading to role confusion and usability issues.
The Goals
- Help parents find and book tutors quickly and confidently
- Reduce friction during onboarding and first-time use
- Design a clear and intuitive dual-role experience (Parent / Tutor)
- Support inclusiveness across language, accessibility, and learning needs
- Validate design decisions through usability testing and iteration
User Research: Summary
To understand how parents and tutors interact within a shared learning platform, I conducted qualitative user interviews with parents (ages 23–45) and tutors (ages 23–70). Participants included working parents, bilingual families, parents of children with special learning needs, and tutors with varied levels of experience and technical comfort.
The initial hypothesis assumed that scheduling flexibility and subject expertise would be the primary decision factors. However, research revealed broader usability challenges. Users struggled with role clarity in dual-role platforms, felt overwhelmed during tutor search, and needed stronger trust signals before booking lessons. Accessibility and language support also emerged as critical needs, particularly for bilingual users and families requiring inclusive learning options.
These insights informed the creation of ten user personas and their corresponding user journeys, which became the foundation for Eduall's design strategy. The research shifted the focus from feature-heavy solutions to clarity, inclusiveness, and confidence — ensuring users can understand their role, find the right tutor, and take action with minimal friction.
Use Journey Maps (Sample)
These two sample journey maps represent key moments in the Eduall experience — one from a Parent perspective and one from a Tutor perspective. They illustrate how users navigate critical flows such as onboarding, discovery, booking, and role management. Although not exhaustive, these journeys were used to validate assumptions, uncover friction points, and inform early design decisions with a strong user-centered focus.
User Flows & Information Architecture
Core flows were designed and validated for both roles, focusing on tutor discovery, booking, role switching, and communication. Separate but mirrored structures were designed for Parent and Tutor roles to ensure consistency while respecting role-specific goals.
The app opens in Parent mode by default: parents represent the primary demand, this reduces cognitive load for first-time users, and it aligns with the "search-first" behavior observed in testing. Role switching remains a visible but secondary action, reinforced at key moments — onboarding, and profile & settings.
Wireframes (Sample)
Before moving into low-fidelity design, I translated research insights into wireframes to define structure, hierarchy, and interaction patterns — prioritizing clarity, role differentiation, and efficient tutor discovery over visual styling.
Low-Fidelity Usability Testing
Five parents and five tutors worked through onboarding, tutor search, booking, messaging, and role switching using a low-fidelity prototype. Round 1 surfaced four core issues: role context wasn't immediately clear, tutor search entry points felt fragmented, filters weren't discoverable, and too many competing calls to action crowded the final onboarding screen. Round 2 tested the fixes — clarified role-switch messaging, a single consolidated search entry point, reduced CTA overload, and more discoverable filters — and each iteration measurably improved task confidence and completion.
Design Interlude — Eduall Brand as a UX System
As the usability studies progressed, it became clear that several of the core challenges identified — particularly role confusion — could not be solved through interaction design alone. Visual identity needed to play an active role in supporting clarity and confidence across the experience. At this stage, the Eduall brand evolved from a visual layer into a functional UX system: rather than treating branding as decoration, I intentionally designed it to communicate meaning, reinforce context, and reduce decision friction — especially in a dual-role environment where users may act as both parents and tutors within the same platform.
1. Role Clarity Through Color and Language
Dark pink is used consistently across the interface for Parent mode, and blue for Tutor mode. The Eduall logo is always accompanied by an explicit role label — PARENT or TUTOR — in the header, so role context is never communicated by color alone.
2. Impact on the High-Fidelity Design
These branding decisions were not aesthetic refinements; they directly informed the high-fidelity iterations that followed. By integrating role clarity, the interface became easier to navigate. In subsequent usability tests, users demonstrated greater certainty when switching roles, faster decision-making during tutor search, and improved comprehension of interface states. This interlude marks the transition from identifying usability problems to delivering a cohesive, research-driven solution — where brand and UX work together as a single system.
Design Focus: Persistent Tutor Search & Role Clarity
1 — Persistent Tutor Search
Parents consistently prioritized tutor discovery as their main task, regardless of where they were within the app. I introduced a persistent tutor search bar at the top of the interface that remains visible across all sections, enabling parents to initiate a search at any moment without navigating back to Home. When tapped, the search expands into a full overlay modal that sits above all other content, intentionally deprioritizing secondary actions and reinforcing tutor discovery as the primary goal.
2 — Role Clarity
Both parents and tutors experienced moments of role confusion — especially during onboarding and early navigation — about whether they were operating in Parent or Tutor mode. During testing, participants responded positively to the explicit color-and-label system, especially those who needed to switch roles or who initially entered the app assuming the wrong context.
Design impact:
- Reduced role confusion during navigation and onboarding
- Faster time to tutor discovery
- Lower cognitive load in dual-role interactions
Prototype in Action
Four short recordings from the validated high-fidelity prototype, covering search and filtering, tutor onboarding, lesson requests, and progress tracking — the flows that mattered most in usability testing.
Accessibility Considerations
Role differentiation relies on brand color, but color is never the only signal: explicit text labels and layout cues keep context legible for users with color vision deficiencies. The interface favors a strong visual hierarchy, plain language, and predictable navigation to reduce cognitive load, with primary actions prioritized and secondary options visually de-emphasized. Primary actions — search, CTAs, cards, filters — use generous touch target sizes and clearly distinct active, focused, and disabled states, supporting both touch and keyboard navigation.
High-Fidelity Usability Testing
A second round of testing with five parents and five tutors validated the high-fidelity designs. Round 1 findings included notifications that weren't easily discoverable, role distinction that relied too heavily on subtle cues, a profile photo competing visually with header elements, insufficient filter visibility, and background-check status that stayed hidden until too late in the search flow. Round 2 addressed each in turn: a dedicated notification icon, explicit PARENT / TUTOR labels in the logo itself, a cleaner header with the profile photo removed, a more prominent filters button, and a visible background-verification badge directly on tutor cards — changes that usability testing confirmed increased trust and accelerated booking decisions.
Final Designs
The validated Parent and Tutor experiences, distinguished at a glance by color and an explicit role label in every header.
Final Thoughts
This project reinforced the importance of designing for trust, accessibility, and clarity in high-stakes educational environments. Iterative testing and close attention to user behavior allowed the product to evolve from assumptions into validated design decisions.
Next steps:
- Full WCAG accessibility audit
- Expanded usability testing with edge cases
- Tutor performance insights and analytics
- Native video and lesson experience integration
"Clear visual cues and well-prioritized actions are essential to helping parents feel confident, in control, and supported when choosing online tutors for their children."