Fighting choice paralysis.
Enabling parents to find the best tutor to support their teens’ academic success.
My role: working end-to-end from discovery to delivery
Team: 7 people
Business context
Goals
My squad's goal was shipping the new parent experience from land to checkout
My role
Constraints
Navigating ambiguity with a tight deadline, we had a 6-months deadline from concept to delivery
Collaboration to resolve ambiguity
We had to decide quickly on what the best experience for parents would be, so as a trio, we had a workshop to identify the next steps and most urgent issues to solve.
⏳
When parents finally find the right tutor, their request has a 20% reject rate and 11% no response rate
❌
30% of tutors didn’t update their availability once last year
Defining the problem
Deciding on the next steps
As a trio, we brainstormed on pro and cons of each approach.
The PM and I looked at both direct and non-direct competitors to understand what was their common behavior in matching customers with contractors.
Crafting a new discovery experience for parents
Parents would fill out a form with their tutoring needs and create a ‘tutor request’, which would be sent to tutors on the marketplace. Only tutors that are actually available, and area good match would come forward. I presented user flow to the wider tech team, which agreed on the approach.
Testing the concept with parents
Summarising insights from usability testings
5 out of 5 parents found the approach straightforward
4 out of 5 are fine with waiting a few hours if highly relevant tutors respond to their request
2 out of 5 parents wanted more than three matches
A previous CRO test I worked on, proved that adding benefits in the staggered flow, parents would see immediate value and complete it.
As we were rebuilding from scratch, I had the chance to propose a new component for the staggered flow.
I presented various iterations to other designers until we all agreed the new component was working.
On the dashboard, parents could view tutors who responded to their request. Usability testing showed that 40% of parents wanted more than three matches. To balance user needs with avoiding choice paralysis, we capped matches at six. This also ensured a diverse pool of tutors, since we intentionally excluded gender filtering to prevent discrimination against non-binary tutors.
The Product Manager suggested adding a sense of personalisation to the list of tutors so I included a personalised message from them. It showed value to the parents as they would only see tutors that were matching their specific requirements.
In collaboration with the Payments squad’s Product Designer, I conducted usability tests to ensure the new payment model - linking membership price to individual lesson cost - was clear to users.
We summarised insights and communicated them to the whole company:
confusion by having to pay before being able to book lessons
billing cadence, and how flexible membership plans were to changes
confusion over how the platform fee worked
I took inspiration from Airbandb and I divided the information on the Plan details page in different sections to remind parents about what plan they were choosing, and to clarify payment details.
Results
🗓 +9% Free Meetings Booked
Our solutions allowed parents and teens to find tutors relevant to their needs and that were available at the time needed, resulting in increased free meetings booked
✍️ +2% sign ups
We used findings from the a/b tests we conducted, to inform the sign up flow. We added more relevant fields and imagery.
Learnings
Overcommunication is vital
Organise a coworking sessions with designers in different teams as soon as possible: they might have requirements very different from yours
Roadmaps need to be aligned (and dreaming is free)