Rosie’s House
Rosie’s House is a non-profit dedicated to provided high-quality, free music education to children in Arizona.
Timeline:
6 Weeks
Role:
UX Researcher
Impact
Consulted Rosie’s House in selecting an educational technology platform to replace inefficient manual processes across Salesforce, Excel, and other tools, streamlining enrollment for 624 students, improving day-to-day usability, and reducing staff burden
Project overview
Rosie’s House, a nonprofit offering free music education in Arizona, lacked a unified system for student data and communication, making staff workflows tedious, error-prone, and distracting from student learning.
Problem
How might we streamline Rosie’s House’s student data and communication systems to make staff workflows more efficient, reduce errors, and allow more focus on student learning?
Challenges
Identify a unified learning management system that consolidates fragmented tools, meets diverse user needs, ensures staff adoption, and saves time without adding complexity, all within a nonprofit’s limited resources.
Methodology
To understand user needs and system pain points at Rosie's House, I led a qualitative research study focused on three key user groups: staff, teachers, and parents. My goal was to uncover barriers to communication, data access, and operational efficiency across the organization.
I developed interview guides tailored to each group to explore daily workflows and challenges, communication habits and frustrations, tool usage and data management, and opportunities for improvement.
In total, we conducted 9 sessions, including 6 one-on-one interviews and 3 focus groups. In total, we conducted 10.5 hours of live research.
Personas
After conducting 9 interviews across staff, teachers, and parents, I created three personas reflect the core needs, frustrations, and goals of Rosie's House stakeholders. Each persona is designed to inform design decisions and prioritize platform improvements.
The Parent persona reveals an urgent need for timely, accessible communication with clarity around student progress.The Staff persona reveals the need for centralized access to student information to reduce manual data entry across various systems..The Teacher persona reveals the need for up-to-date student information and direct communication with parents.User Needs
Using the personas developed from user interviews, we identified critical needs for each user group.
Parents
Accessible, timely updates about their child’s attendance, class changes, and performance.
Insight into their child’s progress, their learning, their success, and ways to support at home.
Teachers
A reliable way to communicate directly with parents to share class updates, concerns, or schedule changes.
Timely access to student information, such as instruments studied, skill level, attendance history, and class participation, to complete accurate progress reports and communicate effectively with families.
Staff
A more efficient, centralized workflow to reduce the time spent re-entering or reconciling data between Excel, Salesforce, FormAssembly, and other tools.
Generate clean, customized reports without relying on time-consuming manual processes.
A single, centralized source for student data, including enrollment status, attendance, instruments, program history, and contact info.
Journey Maps
After developing personas for each user group, I created two journey maps to visualize their experiences with Rosie's House systems. The first map focuses on the enrollment process, and the second map illustrates the day-to-day experience. Each map outlines key touchpoints, emotional highs and lows, pain points, and opportunities for improvement—providing a clear foundation for user-centered design decisions.
Feature Requirements
Based on personas and journey mapping, we identified key system requirements to address communication gaps, data fragmentation, and workflow inefficiencies across Rosie's House. These features are designed to support staff, teachers, and parents with a more unified, accessible, and efficient platform.
Integrated Parent Communication Tools
Identified as critical priority, the new system requires a built-in messaging features that allows teachers and staff to communicate directly with parents via SMS or email, ideally with auto-logging and translation capabilities. Communication should be connected to student profiles for contextual awareness. This feature affects all user groups.
Check-in/Check-out & Building Management System
Identified as high priority, the new system needs a digital check-in/check-out system that tracks entry, exit, and real-time location within the facility. This feature primarily affects staff and teachers with an indirect impact to parents and students.
Centralized student information system
Identified as high priority, the new system requires a single, centralized database that consolidates all core student data including enrollment status, instrument, class schedule, attendance, progress history, and contact information. This feature primarily affects staff and teachers.
Streamlined Attendance Tracking
Identified as high priority, the new system needs a simple, mobile-friendly attendance tool that allows teachers to mark attendance quickly and accurately, with the data automatically syncing to student profiles and available to staff for reporting or follow-up. This feature primarily affects staff and teachers.
Simplified Progress reporting workflow
Identified as medium priority, the new system should contain a feature that enables teachers to log progress notes and complete standardized student evaluations without needing to gather info from multiple sources. This feature primarily affects staff and teachers.
Learning Management System (LMS) for Instructional Support
Identified as medium priority, the new system should a platform where students and parents can access instructional materials (e.g., practice assignments, videos, PDFs, recordings), view class updates, and communicate with teachers. This feature affects staff, teachers, and parents.