ZamaApp is a school management app that lets any school and college perform all activities digitally. Schools and colleges get register on ZamaApp and perform all administrative activities. The administrative activities include managing students, teachers, employees, and parents.

The aim of the app is to connect Students, Parents, Teachers, and the School administration — all in one platform.‎

1. An Innovative mobile application that provides personalized, relevant, and timely ‎communications to improve Parental involvement. ‎
2. It gives students personalized access to what they need instantly, helping to increase student ‎engagement. ‎
3. Empower teachers and administration with innovative tools, data, and insight that helps ‎them to go from reactive to proactive. ‎

💣 Overview

In our current educational ecosystem, parental involvement in a child’s education is often seen as a ‎cornerstone. Parents became frustrated by the number of handouts, emails, mobile messages, ‎homework diaries, and folders they had to check to stay involved in their children’s academic lives.

As ‎parents, they simply wanted to be more engaged in their children’s education.‎ We needed to connect parents with the school to increase student engagement. ‎

On other hand, School Administration, from the classroom to the central office, has an impact on ‎preparing the next generation of learners. They are busy and stuck using manual ways of engaging ‎with students, parents, managing staff, academic, and administrative tasks. Which eats up productive ‎hours of the day and impacts institute performance and student success.‎

The current situation following the closure of schools and colleges is due to digital adaptation.

Nowadays schools and colleges are starting to adopt the digital transformation race. Educators are looking for Interactive, and accessible distance learning solutions. While some school administrations are using Zoom, Skype, or Whatsapp for online classes but this app doesn’t provide a proper classroom experience.

Pakistan’s current educational ecosystem needs digital transformation to help transform the learning experience into a 100% digital experience. This can be done by transforming the concept into an app reality. This will provide students learning beyond the classrooms with the help of teachers.

🎯 Design Goal

1. The design goal was to provide a solution for all the above problems with an understandable and easy interface.
2. The aim was to meet the expectation of all stakeholders, especially the students, to make the app enjoyable for tech-savvy users.
3. Making the user interface similar to what they (Stakeholders) are used to and must also tackle the functionality.
4. Meeting the needs and expectations with unique, eye-catching, and attractive design.
5. The main focus was on user personas and the level of knowledge of those who use it.

✌🏻 My Role in the Project

First of all, this was my first experience as a complete project. (Really learned a lot). From conducting interviews to sketching the wireframes, from research to complete design experience. In short the invloved in product from start to finish.

🧩 Activities

🔦 Research

Kick OFF

Key research methods that I was focused on were market study, competitor study, and user interviews.‎ Before studying competitors I did read some articles and papers on school digital transformation. By ‎collecting ideas and questions.

I move to the 2nd step competitors/similar apps study. ‎

I started by searching for similar apps on the play store and app store. I shortlisted 10 apps both in iOS and Android. By studying those apps and users’ feedbacks on these apps, I listed down issues and problems.

Now as the app is mainly for three types of users i-e student/parent, teacher, and school administration. All these three users have different requirements and different levels of understanding of the app. So I have decided to provide different login within a single app and tailor the screens as per their needs. So there was no need of making a different app for each user.

Now to get started, I was ready for user interviews.

User Interviews

First of all, I prepared a list of valid questions to ask the interviewee and then collected the team’s feedback about my questions before conducting the interviews.

I started taking user interviews 1-1 and 1-Many with 5 Students, 3 Parents, 5 Teachers, and 5 school owners. It was not easy to gather data from Admins and Teachers because they had busy schedules, so we also ‎went to some schools and colleges to conduct my interviews.‎

These interviews and visits gave me insights into their thoughts about what problems they are facing right now. Also what they had in mind to look out for future in the app.

Focus Group

It was easy to get the thoughts of all Users except students. They were not really sure what problems they were facing and why they needs to be solved. So I started explaining to them the problem with their manual way of handling stuff in schools like the class timetable, test results, all account details, Upcoming Activities, etc.

Then explain why these tasks should be done via a mobile app which will save them more time and instant access to all these things.

And after that, they were able to come up with different problems and ideas they had in mind, just needed a little push.

✍🏻 Analyzing the Gathered data

I started to analyze the requirements precisely with the help of user flows, Personas, real users and brainstorming, etc, Which gave me important insights about app users, their needs, and pain points.

Here are some methods I used.

Personas

Brainstorming

User flow

We planned the project based on analysis and were able to define milestones as well as a deliverable of the app modules accordingly.

💡 Design

The analysis helped us find what our user wants and how they want it. That is when we stepped into the design phase and started to design the app by first starting with rough sketches then paper prototypes and so on.

The Result

After the wireframes and High fidelity design, we forward clickable prototype to some of our users and collect feedback by asking some simple questions like,

1. How is the flow?
2. Is it easy to find what you are looking for?
3. What about color combinations?
4. What is hard to find and irritates you?
5. What do you feel while using this app to see your school activities?

After collecting useful feedback we made some changes to the flow. The team sat down and discussed those changes the user wanted. We picked some main issues/changes which were faced by many users and decided to go with changing but in a way that does not disturb the flow and after that, we showed it to some users and their feedback was loving.

Through the above journey, I design the app which empowers teachers and engages students and parents with school administration.

The below is a brief of the 3 users of the app with slight details.

👍🏼 Key Features

Student Dashboard

Likewise from your mobile app home screen, you have a summary of all important activities.

Instant Notification

To begin with, you don’t need to visit the school notice board or any other announcement. Now you can receive all the important notices on your mobile app.

Online classes and Learning Management System

In the first place, now you can attend online classes from your mobile phone. Also, all your syllabus is available in Zama Classroom with assessments.

Digital School Fee Management

This feature helps you manage all fee-related activities with the school. Besides payments detail, you can we fee transactions, receipts, and pending details.

Exam Progress Evaluation

Furthermore, this module includes exam datasheets, exam results, and reports.

School Attendance Module

Similarly, the attendance module provides complete attendance reports. Here it includes a monthly and daily reports on attendance.

Online School Leave Application

Furthermore, now you can send a leave application from your mobile phone and view the total leave history.

Daily Class Timetable

Now you can see your class daily timetable with teacher, class, section, and timing details.

Student Diary

To begin with, you can now have your school diary in your pocket. For instance, you can have a list of your homework and you can submit homework status on the school app.

Parent Suggestion

A parent can send suggestions to the school regarding anything about their child and can get a real-time responses to their suggestion.

School Event Calendar

Furthermore, now you can know about all the yearly events in the school in advance. Also, you can get reminder notifications before the event dates.

Rate Your Teacher

In addition to the above, you can now rate each of your teachers and leave feedback for your teacher.

Teachers

My School Notifications

For instance, you can have all your school notices notifications on your mobile phone now. In short from salary credit to class cancelation.

Teacher Dashboard

With the teacher dashboard, you can have quick access to today’s classes, extra classes, and subjects, etc.

Zama Classroom for Online classes and learning Management System

In this case, now you can conduct your online class from your mobile phone. Also, you can upload your class content against each subject topic-wise.

Teacher Salary Transaction Summary

Above all, you can view the complete detail of your salary transaction with breakdown details.

Class wise Exam Results

Besides, now you can digitally mark your student’s exam papers. Now you can submit exam marking reports from your mobile phone.

Online Student Attendance

Also, you can mark your student attendance just for a single touch.

Teacher Attendance Module

In short, you can record your daily attendance from your mobile. Also, view their attendance.

Classes Time Table

To begin with, you can view your daily classes timetable here. Also, it’s in calendar display and multi-week view.

Homework submission in Student Diary

To summarize, you don’t need to write a diary for each student. Now open the app, select class or individual student, and send daily homework.

Assign Class to other Teacher

Likewise, if you are not available on a specific day, you can assign your class to another teacher.

In-App marking for Test Results

Likewise, you can mark each class’s test assignment from the app.

Overall Class Assessments

Subsequently, you can view overall class assessments. Here you can view each student report, Top 3 and 10 students’ reports.

School Events

Furthermore, you can view school event activities in detail in this module.

Teacher Account

Finally, you can view your short info, personal, contact, admission, and update password option info.

Admin

Admin log-in is the complete feature view for administration. It includes;

Subsequently, you can switch to any of your school campuses and view complete details.

You can view daily attendance, fee collection, exam reports, and expenses in the dashboard.

In addition to that, online classes report, content uploaded, attendance, and all activities going on in Zama Classroom.

Likewise, you can view each student’s info, total students, male and female, withdrawal, application, parent suggestions, and student diary.

Especially, in teacher info, you can have total employee details, male and female, and withdrawals.

Also, you can view reports on new admissions.

Finally, you can manage day-to-day tasks. Also, assign tasks to each individual and view progress.

In short, the reports of all the activities in the Student and Teacher module are here with just one click.

💥 Conclusion

After properly collaborating with the development team while building the product. We did a few different testing sessions with different users and got some really interesting feedback, which at last put a smile on my face.

Thank you for your time.