The Unified Educational Centers, better known as CEUs, are educational equipment deployed in São Paulo that bring together not only education, but also culture, sport and recreation. With 46 functional units currently, and 12 more under construction, the CEUs offer their students and the surrounding community an extensive and diverse daily schedule.
The challenge
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The CEUs are centers that offer multiple activities to the community, however, their promotion was very poor through spreadsheets that were too hidden in the Secretariat's portal. As a result, the audience of events before the pandemic was very low and generating more damage than actually returning to the population.
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Goal
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How can we facilitate the population's access to CEUs programming and thus engage our events and activities more?
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Metodology
This project was based on, and continues to be based on, the double diamond methodology. The first part included a discovery workshop that wthat was held by the project's UX Research, which later consolidated the results in an online mural that became my reference for the solution.
Today the project is still in progress and we're in a refinement phase. The next steps involve applying a focus group and then facilitate training workshops.
Define
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The workshop generated a series of desirable features for those involved, including great stories for the expansion of the backlog, but, at this first moment we focused on the issue of the promotion.
So we created a specific portal for the CEUs, developed in Wordpress, as we judged its ease in registering information. The portal has a homepage explaining about the CEUs, also informations about each of the units, their schedule and a featured page for events.
Prototype - Front
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Due to the fair time of the project, the prototypes were already designed on the high fidelity and always being validated each step at a time. First the flow of the events, later the map and the units page and at the last the homepage.
After some small tests we noticed that most of the population only knows the closest CEU unit, or even know anyone, so they searched for the nearby region. With this we decided to standardize the colors of the respective pages to the zones of city ​​to facilitate searches and filtering.
Prototypes - Back
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Although the portal is made in Wordpress, which makes handling easier, our admin users are diverse in terms of contact with technology, so I had a lot of work to design and align all the internal flows for registration of units and events considering the different types that we list and their peculiarities.
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The cool thing about this process was to deepen the knowledge about Wordpress and always have aligned the client's expectations with the possibilities that the tool allows and in this aspect, the partnership with the developer has been fundamental.
Usability Tests Group
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After all the prototypes were approved and developed, I decided to carry out a round of usability tests, just so the admin users could have initial contact with the administrative panel. The problem was that the schedules were extremely complex, so we ran 2 sessions with 6 users testing simultaneously.
Based on the script I had assembled, I would demonstrate each task to the users and ask them to play it back. We left with a number of improvements and new streams to review.
Video demonstrating current version
The video below demonstrates the review that were carried out after the usability tests. Early next month I will apply a focus group to validate and complete this first release.
