Cubby Class

2021

Cubby Class is an online platform for elementary students that crowdsources parent volunteers during remote learning.

During COVID-19, stay-at-home orders left schools and families unprepared for the switch to remote learning. Without the support of childcare programs, parents had to to juggle home-school in addition to their jobs and care-taking duties.

My Contribution
Researcher
UI Developer
Video prototyper

Collaborators
Ariel Chiang
Joyce Lin
Leon Zhang

Overview

Cubby Class minimizes learning loss of young children and improves autonomy to reduce stress on parents/families. Students can build tailored schedules with their adults and join crowdsourced classes and activities hosted by other people. Students can navigate their day-to-day with the help of a friendly assistant, and a schedule presented in relative time.

Design Research

Our initial focus was on assisting the time management of parents with young children during the pandemic. However, when analyzing results from a preliminary survey, we found that the largest pain point involved home-schooling. After synthesizing our data collected from surveys an interviews of parents and children, we defined our target users' needs. To guide our ideation, we created five personas of demographics that we needed to consider when creating a solution: primary personas, secondary persona, excluded persona, and an anti-persona.

Design Process

After identifying key insights, personas, and user needs in the design research phase, we began ideation. A few brainstorming sessions allowed us to further narrow our concept into a single design direction, which we developed through journey mapping, storyboarding and crafting various user flows. To conclude the eight-week project, we developed a clickthrough prototype and tested the overall design on four individuals.

Cubby Class Student View GIF walkthrough

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