yellowarrow.com.au
A digital platform to help teachers deliver leadership programs within the education system.
Categories: Education
Yellow Arrow Leadership was founded in late 2019, a startup which delivers off-line and on-line workshops to help leaders in schools to embrace creativity and lead with purpose. Leadership training for students explores topics such as; problem solving, communication, public speaking, positive behavioral support, reflection, psychology and emotional intelligence. The business was very much in the early stages, having only just piloted two workshops.
Client
Felicity Walter – Co-Founder
Michael Walter – Co-Founder
Time
2 weeks
Team
Paula White – Service Designer
Robert Bruno – Service Designer
Aleksandra Skibola – Service Designer
Diane Gatto – Service Designer
Deliverables
Competitor Analysis
Market sizing & opportunities
Persona’s
Journey Map
Ideation & Concept
Activities to launch
My contribution
Competitor Analysis
Research
Synthesis
Ideation
Prototyping
Concept testing
Presenting
The Challenge
Yellow Arrow had their first workshop planned for December 2020, but they were struggling to onboard additional participants out of their existing network. Their first service to launch was designed for students, but their customer would be the teacher – a time poor person who is given the task of training and developing student leaders in schools.
We were engaged to develop a deeper understanding of these teachers to be able to further define and tailor Yellow Arrows services. By solving for the customers specific needs and wants Yellow Arrow would be able to provide a unique offering that could be more effectively marketed to attract future participants. It would also offer reassurance to Felicity and Michael that this would not only be a desirable service offering but would be a viable long term business venture for them to pursue.
Impact opportunity
The specific service Yellow Arrow wanted us to focus on for teachers was their online workshop that included the unique ‘Escape Room’ experience. This was a real point of difference for Yellow Arrow, a set of experimental challenges for student leaders in groups of 6. The students would be in a ‘virtual’ room and given a scenario where they would have to work together to solve puzzles, it would involve public speaking and negotiating – all useful activities to develop their leadership skills. We needed to create a simplified and unified approach in which Yellow Arrow can engage with teachers to deliver leadership training in schools.
The Process
1. Discovery
16 survey responses
8 one-to-one interviews
Desktop research incl. competitor analysis
MBA project & Jamboard analysis
We began our journey with in-depth interviews of school teachers, participants provided to us by Yellow Arrow. These were all teachers who currently delivered a leadership program in their school.
We wanted to uncover any problems they were facing with this responsibility and identify any of their pain points.
Existing collateral
We looked at existing research supplied to us by Yellow Arrow;
An MBA project
Jam Boards from focus groups
Market research
Social media and marketing strategy
Current program structures
Previous workshop analysis
We were able to study the content provided to have a deeper understanding of Yellow Arrow and the direction of the business.
Competitor analysis
We looked into direct competitors and trend setters in the youth education industry. We discovered 8 stand out businesses that Yellow Arrow could learn from, and evaluated them on a matrix linked to customer needs online vs offline and standardisation vs customisation. Yellow Arrow was already offering one online service but an opportunity presented itself for them to offer more services that were online that would be flexible and tailored towards individual teachers needs.
Survey
We ran a survey to gather insights on teachers' needs with delivering leadership in schools. We distributed it amongst Yellow Arrows' existing network and teachers from our own network.
The top insights we received from the survey included;
The student connection to facilitator is very important (including vernacular and vibe) ranked 4 or higher (out of 5) for 10 of the 14 survey participants.
Experience of facilitators was second most important factor of deciding upon external programs.
78% would consider externally run programs for a whole year group, as opposed to 28% for a small group of 10-30 students with one participant saying “it makes financial sense to engage as many students as possible”.
Currently, no responses use external providers to facilitate their leadership programs.
Only 35% of responses show student leaders have been given the opportunity to develop their skills during remote learning.
Interviews
The team spoke to 8 teachers with various responsibilities in delivering leadership in schools, and we synthesised the findings into 4 main points.
The largest insight highlighted teachers’ needs to see clear links to the curriculum and having a customised program to make it relevant to students.
At present, the most common way teachers find external program facilitators is through word of mouth recommendations to ensure reliability.
Teachers were more likely to book external program facilitators for a whole year level over a smaller leadership group.
There was a great need for teacher training that highlights the necessity for resources and more knowledge in the area of leadership.
When asked about online learning teachers expressed a concern, because they prefer to empower young leaders in a face-to-face environment as it helps to determine their level of engagement and interaction and drive a sense of team collaboration.
Interview Synthesising
2. Identifying Opportunities
After collating our research insights we were able to identify common traits and values to create a persona that would allow us to see their most significant pain points, and which opportunities we could leverage to add value to Yellow Arrows existing service offering.
Persona
In summary, the key points that would make Kerry’s role more efficient and manageable are:
Time management system
More support and guidance in her role as a teacher in a leadership position
Additional resources outside her community
Help in delivering highly engaging content for her students – she is motivated by their achievements and personal development
Equipped with a better understanding of Kerry’s challenges when faced with delivering a leadership program, we mapped out the steps she takes when trying to facilitate leadership learnings by herself. By mapping her journey, we were able to identify the area of greatest opportunity for Yellow Arrow to help Kerry.
We saw several low points in her journey that could lead to great opportunities for helping Kerry. Overall we discovered Kerry felt immensely overwhelmed about her leadership role responsibilities in delivering the program, she faced difficulty in finding the time and relevant resources. It was from this insight we were able to create three How might we statements that would inform the direction of the creative.
How might we deliver the virtual escape room for the whole year group in a fun and engaging way?
How might we customise the product for Kerry and for the curriculum to offer flexibility?
How might we make it easier for Kerry to use the escape room and improve her relationship with students?
3. Ideation
Our team used multiple ideation methods to solve the HMW statements. We had strong ideas built around a gaming and competition platform, however we felt this wouldn’t solve Kerry’s pain points thoroughly enough.
We wanted to focus on solving the issue of scheduling and organising the students. The technology driver in the creative matrix produced some highly efficient ideas in building an all in one system. Making it super easy for Kerry to run through all her admin work, plan her students and assess their needs right before the workshop takes place.
Creative Ideation Matrix
4. Concept creation
We developed this idea further and designed an all in one digital platform for Kerry, the platform would help her maintain and grow the leadership program in her school, having onboarded with Yellow Arrow to deliver specific programs. Kerry will have her own login to view her dashboard, schedule her students, book workshops with Yellow Arrow, gather helpful resources and participate in the delivery of the ‘Escape Room’.
The platform solves several pain points of Kerry’s identified in our research, it will;
Reduce admin overload
Provide a convenient resource library
Assist with time management and scheduling
Measure the success for both Kerry and the students
Allow for customisation of modules to cater for individual student needs
Acorn Concept Poster
5. Design solution and testing
We wanted to test a number of assumptions we had made about the platform with teachers. We used the concept poster to demonstrate the Acorn experience, and presented it to four participants for feedback. We wanted to learn how we might improve the final solution and find out if it would deliver to their individual needs.
We were happy to see that verbal feedback directly related to Kerry’s current pain points of keeping the students engaged in creative ways, while also reducing the amount of time to gather the right information for student follow ups and feedback.
The concept received a rating of 4 and higher out of 5, with 100% of customers validating that it was a great idea, and 75% strongly felt the service would reduce administrative responsibilities.
“I like the model, it is very similar to many other teaching tools we use now. I like the clear progression and ability for collaboration.”
— Testing participant
“The ability to reduce workload and content preparation is important. Quality content is sacrificed when time is tight.”
— Testing participant
“It provides a more solid framework - something that can actually be a discussion starter with students.”
— Testing participant
“If this tool is able to assist in identifying individuals capabilities and can be used over time to indicate growth then that would be a great benefit.”
— Testing participant
6. Engaging handover
With the learnings from our testing we then mapped out the sum of all Kerry’s experiences in a Service Blueprint, this showed all of her interactions with the Acorn platform and how Yellow Arrow can facilitate this service.
Service Blueprint
We decided to dive in a little deeper with the service offering, and produce an MVP matrix that mapped out all of the features within the Acorn service. With considerations from testing we could position the functionalities teachers appreciated the most and which features can be added in the first release. This allows Yellow Arrow to start off small and gradually build up to produce a better, more polished full service offering that would add the most impact for their customers. From this, we looked at a simple timeline of the high level activities required to launch the ‘Acorn’ service.
MVP Feature prioritisation
Activities to launch
Outcome
By delivering a resourceful and informative dynamic user experience, we will be able to reduce teachers administration time while also maintaining the teacher to student mentor relationship that teachers feel to be of most value.
The USP of the service are;
Access, track and measure student progress and teacher mentoring
Modules aligned to the curriculum
Organising teacher & data reports
Provide individual / group feedback to students looking at areas of improvement as well as strengths
Collaborative learning experience for young leaders that provides feedback and growth indicators
All of which not only benefit the teachers and the students but Yellow Arrow, because these features provide data that can be used to build credibility and trust in the market, the content can then be used as a marketing tool to attract potential customers.
Reflection
Though the team tried to work with minimal assumptions, qualitative research was hard to obtain regarding the teachers. During the 2 week sprint it was a particularly busy time of year with school exams, and because of COVID-19 teachers were busier than usual. Additional in-depth research will need to be evaluated and discussed with various stakeholders to determine how difficult the service would be to implement and ensure that the proposed concept is immensely valuable before moving forward. We would also suggest further behavioural research into the end users of the service – the students, to ensure we are delivering to their needs and that the platform would be an engaging experience for them too.
Client Feedback
“This is really awesome, the service blueprint has so much detail, such a good resource and with so many great ideas fleshed out. All that data and research you have given us, will be so valuable moving the business forward especially with Kerry the persona”
— Michael Walter
“Based on our own knowledge, we know you’ve reflected the persona ‘Kerry’ really well. Everyone is time poor and that's the problem we are trying to solve. So we know it would have been difficult to get all this research you have given us. My brain is just buzzing, this is just awesome”
— Felicity Walter