In China, it’s common that a teacher leads a class of 20-30 students in the kindergarten. A teacher deals with a large amount of information from various channels. It results teachers into chaos, while parents feel frustrated making their voice heard.
Unbalanced
PENETRATING DILEMMA
However, the feedback from the market was not as good as our expectation. Did we really satisfy customer's needs? Why were they unwilling to try a better product, even though they had to tolerate ton's of pain points?
Project Planning
CICADA
Business Analyst
User Researcher
UX Designer
My Role
Feb. - Jun. 2015
Xi'an, China
Date & Location
Zijun Zhou
Tiantian Wang
Weiying Yang
Xinwen Zhao
Team
Education
Sector
At a Glance
Cicada is an educational mobile social tool, developed by Beijing Chanming Information Technology Co.Ltd. It aims to break the communication barrier between teachers and parents. This project was proposed in 2013, but didn't meet expectation from market. Therefore, our team dug out the underlying reasons, and repositioned and redesigned the product.
MARKETING ​POTENTIAL
It’s a common circumstance in the school where the communication between teachers and parents has to rely on the intermediary, students. The traditional mobile social tools, though ease the issue to a degree, users still face problems of inequality, misunderstanding and information leakage.
" Teachers and parents are struggling in communication, which no single existing tool can solve all the problems. Therefore, Cicada was developed solely for the communication between teachers and parents. "
The communication between teachers and parents relies on the intermediary, students. It’s quite inconvenient and misunderstanding is likely to happen, when students are young kids.
Indirect
Function Overlap
The initial version of Cicada only had two main functions: Group Broadcast for teachers to inform parents; Class Chat for teachers and parents within a class.
Though Cicada provided a solution for the above problems, it could be replaced by existing tools with similar functions.
Slow Diffusion
Parents have different backgrounds and are in a wide age range. They can be obstructed in any stage in Innovation-Decision Process. And this probability increases along with the color depth of the background in the figure.
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What’s more, teachers usually have no right to decide on communication tools, according to policy and regulations. Behind them there are groups of stakeholders, who are laggards in accepting new things.
Scatter Plot of Parent Sample