👩‍💻 my role: UX research, UX design, UI design
Foxford is an online school. It offers courses, tutors, and an opportunity to study online the whole time instead of going to school. In this project, we focused on the experience of choosing a tutor.
The current process of choosing a tutor is inconvenient for students and costs the business a lot of money.
Originally, before a student or their parent buys a course with a tutor, they get a free lesson with a methodologist. The methodologist measures the student’s knowledge, shows them our platform (LMS), and helps to choose the right tutor. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to choose a tutor right away, so a large number of our students reach out to support to help them choose a tutor afterward.
Many of our current students don’t bother going to a free lesson and buy classes with a tutor in bulk. This way, they also have to call or email the support to choose the right tutor.
This way, the amount of time that elapses between a purchase and the moment a student starts studying was 4 weeks, so we got a lot of refund requests. Also, our support is handling up to 4218 requests a month considering choosing a tutor. That’s around 170 hours a month.
We assumed that we’ll cut the spending and provide a better experience to our users if we let them choose a tutor by themselves. There’s an underlying assumption that our users actually prefer choosing a tutor themselves, not getting a recommendation.
We gathered information about how students and their parents choose a tutor to define a hypothesis. We used the support team’s statistics and existing research reports, created by our research team.
What our users rely on when choosing a tutor: