GreatSchools’ profiles
GreatSchools.org is a leading resource for school quality information, with 62 million unique visitors a year. Half of all American families reference this valuable resource, and my role as lead product designer was to employ user-centered principles and innovate upon the product so that people can both find and advocate for the best education possible.
School profiles, the de facto front page
The school profile experience has by far the most traffic, accounting for about 66% of overall views. The vast majority of users find their way to GreatSchools through organic search, so revamping this experience is giving millions of people a different view of the value that GreatSchools can provide.
Why the redesign?
The company took on this major initiative for a couple reasons. First, the bounce rate was quite high and people weren’t immediately finding what they were looking for, which obviously impacts ad revenue but also hampers the nonprofit's reach on educational advocacy. The second reason is that the notion of "school quality" was changing. In past years both what was available and what people tended to focus on were test scores. Today, there is more of a holistic view on the facets that make up a school’s quality, one that includes more difficult-to-capture social/emotional, curriculum variety, and cultural aspects.
Features following the research
The product team and I were able to execute on and combine the findings wrought from dozens of usability sessions and over 1,800 survey responses. I'll highlight two of the interesting research conclusions and how I sought to address them.
Most users coming to GreatSchools were looking for information on school quality. HOWEVER(!) this group expressed the lowest likelihood of saying they accomplished their task.
Regarding what info was seen as more trustworthy — evenly split between standardized ratings and first-person reviews.
Feature 1: The "Multiple Measures" ratings system
“Multiple Measures” is intended to (partly) solve for the first painpoint mentioned above, that users looking for school quality information often aren't finding what they're looking for. My key role as a product designer was to package as much meaningful information in a snapshot view as we could, and that’s what the ratings system is all about.
My chief collaborators for this effort was the VP of Data Strategy and a Senior Product Manager. The strategy leader started us off with a proposal and the PM and I got to work on testing with users and refining the solution.
Ultimately, the refined solution was designed to pare down the original proposal from 23 ratings to a more comprehensible set of 8, and to make those 8 measures something intuitive, transparent, and reflective of parents’ concerns.
Creating the “Academic Fairness” measure, the broccoli with the meal
Another component to how GreatSchools rates schools includes the nonprofit’s mission concerning educational advocacy and equity. My chief collaborator, a PM, liked to say that we supply "broccoli with the meal." What he meant by that is while users don't come to our site to tackle issues like educational inequity, we are going to provide that "nutritious snack" for people to chew on.
At the risk of exhausting the metaphor, our research indicated users would much rather skip GreatSchools’ broccoli recipe. I thought we could improve upon that!
Feature 2: "Topical Reviews"
Topical reviews is a direct response to the research findings that just as many people base their decisions on school quality from first-person reviews as they do from standardized metrics. However, to this point, the reviews feature was never really a focus of the company, and they were losing out to competitors in this aspect.
My product-manager-in-crime and I collaborated on creating topical reviews because we knew through testing that parents had several important concerns about a school that metrics couldn't answer. Things like, "how much homework does this school require?" and "how does this school deal with bullying?"
Collecting more reviews by framing a conversation, then cycling to the next
The really basic goal behind this project was to get more and fresher reviews for all the schools that we have profiles for. A key way that I reduced the friction for creating reviews was a seamless transition from one review topic to another…a loop that goes on and on. There are no dead ends!
Collecting good reviews around good topics
The topics we chose were issues that we knew to be important to many parents. But more than that, we tried our best to frame the discussion in ways that are constructive. For instance, by asking parents to relay details about certain school policies and how it was working or wasn't. We also created the space to directly thank teachers or administrators (which doesn't happen nearly enough!). I have to credit my product manager collaborator for his valuable insights around school topics, which I came to realize carried over from his prior experience as an elementary school teacher. This is one of my first forays working with someone I would later label an SME (subject matter expert).
Topical reviews helped to close a blindspot in the organization, which is that there are aspects about a school that metrics can't answer. More reviews also helps the company's search engine optimization, as well as improving how users feel about the product/brand. The benefits all go together!
Overall Results from the Revamped Profile
An increase in Net Promoter Score, for low income parents and overall
With both groups moving from “passive” to “promoters”
Individual ad performance dramatically improved
+5% in click-through rate, +75% viewability, +63% programmatic coverage
New reviews tripled
when compared to the year before