Ministry of Education • 2019

Empowering parents to make an informed decision for their child's education

Enhancing the Primary and Special Educational Needs (SEN) section of the Ministry of Education (MOE) website.

Problem

The website was not effective and efficient enough in helping parents to fulfil their tasks. This led to an increasing level of anxiety within parents since looking to apply for the right school for their child is an important milestone.

"P1 registration process is like a big scary monster coming."
– Mother of a 2 year old daughter
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"MOE website has too much information and is difficult to search - as a working Mom, there is no time to read."
– Single mother of a 7 and 2 year old daughter
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"It is too complicated, I would need someone to explain it to me."
– Mother of a 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son

Role
Product designer

Scope
End-to-end design execution, stakeholder and user interview, usability testing, cross-functional collaboration

Timeline
January - April 2019

Research

Conducted 15 user interviews with parents of primary school students. The goals of the user interview were to:

Uncover their experience of primary school or special needs
Understand their challenges, motivations and how they make decisions
Gather user feedback on the current website

Insight 1

Parents struggle to find relevant content due to the website’s information-heavy and tedious structure, often turning to alternative sources or customer service touchpoints for help.

Insight 2

The use of jargon, MOE-specific terms, and unclear explanations of phases and eligibility often confuses parents who are registering their child for the first time or are unfamiliar with the education system.

Insight 3

Parents, especially those with special needs children, are unaware of support options due to poor visibility of information and rely mostly on word-of-mouth or informal networks.

Solution

Redesigning the Primary and Special Educational Needs (SEN) section of the Ministry of Education (MOE) website

Organising content based on user journey

We organised the website to align the journey that parents are going through so that they can easily find content and complete their tasks. Instead of having chunks of information, we added topic cards (e.g. Primary (P1) Registration) to the primary landing page. This allows parents to view many different topics at a glance which enables them to quickly and easily focus on the topic at hand. We also added a section to highlight important key dates or announcements.

Before

After

Providing guidance

A comprehensive list of steps they need to take (that presents an end to end journey) to guide them along the Primary (P1) registration.

Step by step navigation appears within sub topic pages to ensure that parents know which part of the journey they are at, and it also helps them to navigate easily.

Building tools to help parents get answers easily

Instead of navigating long chunks of text to find the answers, we built some tools to help parents get answers easily by answering a few questions or entering their criteria.

Checking of child's registration phase

Scanning through the registration phase content was tedious. Even after the reading the content, some parents still did not understand which phase they belonged to. By building the Phase Checker, we helped them understand which registration phase they belong to easily by answering a few questions.

Finding schools made easier

Previously, parents had to scan through a list of school in a table. By building SchoolFinder, we helped them filter the list of schools easily by entering their criteria, or simply search for a school or keyword. Parents can also shortlist the schools they are considering to enrol their child into.

We have arranged criterias from the most important to the least important criterias when they are deciding which school they would want to enrol their child into.

Parents can learn more about schools. They can also view the subjects offered, electives and programme, Co-curricular Activities (CCAs) and support for special needs.

Visualising education pathways for special needs

We designed an interactive tool to educate and help parents visualise the different education pathways for their child. The graph (on the right) provides the entire pathway in a glance. As the user scrolls down the content, the step will be highlighted in colour in the graph.

Results

The feedback from the public was very positive, with many noting that it was much more comprehensive to find their answers and easier to navigate.

"This is so much easier to use compared to the current website because sometimes the information that I want is not presented together and requires a lot of clicks. The new design helps a lot because I can see everything in one shot."
– Mother of a 6 year old daughter and 4 year old son (during usability testing)

Helping parents understand the preschool landscape better

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