Some details
The DC Public Charter School Board had what amounted to a long page of alphabetized charter schools, which for parents trying to find charter schools by way of traits like school quality, health or even location, was challenging–to say the least. Moreover, parents couldn’t separate information about the Board from information about the schools they were looking for.
Taoti conducted user testing to better respond to user
needs. What’s notable in this case is the inclusion of a D.C. parent in that process. Parents need to use the DCPCSB website to target the District’s best schools. Their experience was critical to the redesign effort.When we conducted user testing, what we found was that the difference between finding a school and evaluating one wasn’t clear to parents. We relabeled the navigation and made a clear call-to-action indicating where parents needed to go to find a new school.
Education Watchdog, a project of the Franklin Center for Government &, Public Integrity, took notice and acknowledged that “the new search tools could have aided [a parent] search for a language-based school for her 6-year-old daughter.” We strive for all our projects to have such an obvious impact on critical end users.
