Parents Gateway – Ministry of Education of Singapore
Role in the project: User Interaction | User Interface | Visual Design
About The Project
Parents Gateway is an initiative by the Ministry of Education of Singapore (MOE). It is a portal that helps parents collectively keep up-to-date with their children’s school programmes and activities. It conveniently allows parents to interact with schools on administrative and financial matters. It caters to parents with children in the primary level, all the way up to junior college.
Color Scheme
Pain Points
• Busy parents found it difficult to keep up with their child’s school/after school activities.
• Consent forms issued by the schools often went missing.
• At times, school announcements were not relayed back to the parent.
• Parents would have to use multiple apps to communicate with different subject teachers.
(Above): Mobile design for on-boarding screens
Problem Statement
Parents found it increasingly difficult to keep up with their child’s school life, whether it was keeping track of their school schedules, excursions or announcements. Parents needed an easier way to incorporate their child’s schedule into their already busy lives.
(Above): Low fidelity paper sketches and high fidelity visual design for the consent and payment flow
(Above): Low fidelity paper sketches and high fidelity visual design for the registration flow
The Solution
To design a all-in-one platform where parents can interact with their children’s schools easily and keep up-to-date with their child’s progress, after school schedules and activities.
(Above): Mobile design for viewing past event details
Main Concerns
• The level of digital knowledge across every parent was different — therefore we could not design something that looked too complex.
• The security of a child’s personal information — to solve this, extra security steps had to be added for the sign up flow, such as the registration of parent’s and child’s identification numbers with the ministry and also, only the primary parent was allowed to access the application.
Design Approach
• To create something that looked relatable, simple, casual and vibrant.
(Above): Desktop adaptation of the application
Design Iterations
The design was iterated after a couple of usability testings. Some of the changes made includes,
• The removal of the “more” button. It was initially placed in the design to indicate to the users that there was more to the article. However, it was later removed as users would naturally scroll to view the rest of the article, rather than have them click and scroll to view the rest of the information.
• The bookmark icon was also changed to a star icon as users seem to relate more to the star icon when it came to saving the articles into the “favourites” section.
• The clickable action colour was also adjusted to be a slightly darker shade to meet the web accessibility standards.
Above: Some design iterations that were made from the earlier to current design
Deliverables
• Screen designs for the initial user flow of the application, for both mobile and desktop.
– on-boarding user flow
– consent/payment user flow
– announcement user flow
• Screen designs of the admin portal that the teachers would interact with.
• The visual design of the application and design library for the initial user flow.