Oh hey there! I'm Grace.

Redefining parent-teacher collaboration to support children's holistic growth

Havence / Mobile App / Product Design

Background

Scope

To create a proof-of-concept (POC) based on secondary research. This POC will serve as a foundational design for further iterative development guided by user feedback. My role included UX research, UX strategy, wireframing and prototyping.

Client

Havence is a customizable preschool management app that support teachers and parents in managing tasks effectively.

Timeline

3 weeks

Context

Problem

There's a gap between the importance of parent-teacher collaboration and the tools available to support it, resulting in disengagement and missed opportunities for student growth.

This gap is especially evident in Singapore, where the MOE's NEL (Nurturing Early Learners) framework has emphasized holistic development since 2003. Yet, two decades on, many parents remain passive participants, highlighting a persistent disconnect between schools and families. To address this, collab must move beyond information updates to become engaging, intentional and shared.

CONSTRAINTS

Tight timeline meant the project had little room for extended research or iteration before launch

Lacked resources meant we had to be highly intentional with our decisions - from finding alternative ways to gather insights to prioritizing features

Solution

We prioritized launching a focused, functional MVP to validate the product's core value early by defining a minimal feature set rooted in addressing the core issue - collaboration inefficiencies.

A gamified platform to drive parent-teacher collaboration through shared goals and mutual accountability.

Teachers

Set and track goals, engage parents and climb the scoreboard alongside student’s goal progress.

Parents

Track and complete goal tasks, co-set tasks and move their child’s rank up the scoreboard.

Supporting features

Mutual point and scoreboard to motivate progress

Point system ties teacher success directly to parent engagement, creating shared accountability
Visible ranking system provides effort recognition, making progress feels rewarding

Teacher

Parent

Discussion board to encourage communication and foster trust

Each goal has a dedicated discussion space for targeted guidance and interventions
Real-time notifications keeps everyone in the loop, ensuring no messages are missed

Teacher

Parent

Process

researching the problem space

Desk research revealed four barriers to parent engagement in child's holistic development

Academic achievement as the standard of success

Most parents equate success with academic milestones, making it difficult for them to buy into alternative approaches.

Dysfunctional teamwork & communication

Reactive and defensive behavior of parents and teachers cause friction and conflict, reducing motivation on both ends.

Limited exposure & understanding

Resources for parents are limited and not actively promoted, leaving parents uninformed and disinterested.

Lack of visible progress or outcome

There are currently no tangible metrics available to track progress and outcome, parents struggle to see its value.

Learning from successful models

Comparative study revealed opportunities to enhance engagement through parent-teacher collaboration

Research into Finland and New Zealand showed their success in holistic development is driven by strong parent-teacher collaboration. This discovery prompted me to compare their practices with our own to identify gaps.

✶ Teachers key practices

Finland

N. Zealand

Singapore

Co-develop learning goals with parents

✔️

❌

Identify engagement opportunities

✔️

😐

Facilitate development activities

✔️

Provide support to achieve goals

✔️

😐

Provide regular feedback

✔️

😐

Engage in regular communication with parents

✔️

😐

✱ Parents key practices

Finland

N. Zealand

Singapore

Co-develop learning goals with teachers

✔️

❌

Observe child progress

✔️

😐

Provide regular child progress update

✔️

❌

Practice development activities

✔️

❌

Engage in regular communication with teachers

✔️

😐

analyzing market and competitions

Competitive analysis highlighted the lack of a parent-teacher collaboration solution

Qoqolo

Taidii

Illumine

Current solutions primarily provide basic communication and information-sharing tools, however:

❌ Passive communication tools does not guarantee engagement

❌ One-sided reporting functionality lacks actionable feedback for parents

❌ Obligatory parent assignment feels like a chore and forceful by nature

This finding highlighted a gap in the market for a solution that actively promote parent-teacher collaboration, reinforcing our opportunity for development in this area.

defining proto-persona

Consolidating key insights into proto-personas to address collaboration challenges and frustrations

Since the focus is on collaborative solution, it would most likely be a tool shared between parents and teachers. Therefore, I included teacher as a supporting end users who shared an overarching goal.

✶ Proto-personas were grounded in desk research, behavioral observations, and insights from existing educational tools (local forums, social medias, news articles). These were used as working hypotheses to guide early design decisions.

How Might we…

Motivate parents and teachers to build a trusting collaboration that enhances engagement in children's holistic development?

Features ideation

Outlining key user scenarios to ideate for targeted features

To ensure we met user needs while staying within project constraints, I started by mapping out key user scenarios for each proto-persona. These scenarios were based on our initial assumptions but provided a solid foundation for identifying targeted features.

Given our tight timeline + limited resources, I prioritized lean, functional feature set necessary for the MVP. This meant only including features that were critical to the core user journey that would directly support parent-teacher interaction and collaboration without introducing additional complexity.

Integrating gamified model

Sustained motivation inspired a gamified model focused on shared accountability

Building on the identified features, keeping parents and teachers motivated and engaged required more than just functional tools. Drawing inspiration from motivational theory, which emphasizes the power of points, progress, and rankings in driving intrinsic motivation, I designed a gamified model to turn collaboration into a rewarding and sustainable experience.

Rationale: The model aligned both parties' efforts by tying teacher success to parent participation through a point system and a shared scoreboard. This created a continuous feedback loop of motivation and accountability, helping reinforce ongoing engagement and keep both parties incentivized.

Mapping user flows

Consideration for our users’ needs and constraints guided a user flow focused on quick and sustained collaboration

A closer look at some of the high-level key user flows:

Through research findings, we learned that teachers often have limited time during class and they couldn’t afford multi-step inputs or high interaction cost. This pushed us to simplify our forms, reduce the number of clicks to update a goal, and avoid asking for unnecessary information.

Since many users of havence already used tools like WhatsApp, I designed the in-app interaction tool to complement (not replace) those workflows. Instead of real-time chat (which can be noisy and hard to track), I introduced a threaded discussion board focused on structured, asynchronous updates.

This format allowed teachers/ parents to post goal related updates/ questions/ progress at their own pace while keeping communication organized by goal. It also provided a clear record of collaboration tied directly to specific goals, something traditional chat tools doesn't support.

Designing low-fidelity wireframes

Defining interface layout with low-fidelity designs

With tight timeline and limited resources, I started with rough wireframes of key screens. Through multiple iterations and client feedbacks, the design evolved from a standard list-based structure to an intuitive card-based layout that improves content hierarchy and information scanning.

Parent

Teacher

Final outcome

Onboarding + View & Track Goals (parent)

Initiate Discussions + Receive Reply Notification (parent)

Complete Task + View Ranking (parent)

Set New Goal (teacher)

View Class & Student Progress (teacher)

Next steps

Development and validation phase

The next step involves handing the design over to the development team for implementation. Once deployed, the feature will be available to existing clients. Feedback and data will be collected to validate core functionalities for further iterations.

The monitoring phase will span 2 months, during which we will track key success metrics:

Engagement

Target of average 20% weekly active users - both parent and teachers - across schools

Task Completion

Target of average 15% assigned tasks completed by parents across schools

Comm. Frequency

Target of average 3+ interactions/ week between parties across schools

Once sufficient data is collected, we will begin the first round of iteration, focusing on refining features and addressing usability or engagement issues identified during the monitoring phase.

Key takeways

When user research is scarce, it is crucial to stay agile

Balancing assumptions with actual user needs was a challenge. While desk research guided the design direction, it was difficult to fully understand what users truly needed without direct feedback. However, this uncertainty has also pushed me to stay agile and constantly evaluate my decision to ensure the design remained adaptable, so that it can be evolved to better meet user needs when real-world data became available.

Challenging conventional solutions open new possibilities

It’s tempting to rely on conventional solutions, especially when dealing with established issues. For instance, improving communication channels might seem like an obvious way to enhance collaboration, yet this approach risks a solution that may not fully address the underlying issues. This realization pushed me to explore other strategies and rethink how we can create impactful solution that can open up possibilities and change the way users traditionally engage with holistic development, in which gamification is being adopted.

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Crafted with love and many cups of matcha latte 🍵