Context
Messaging is the most used feature by brightwheel centers, with 85% adoption; it is an essential tool to nearly every school administrator and is used daily to engage with staff and families. A few notes about the feature:
Messages can be sent to either family members or staff members.
Messages can be general messages (like emails), alerts, reminders, newsletters or announcements.
Messaging is a subset of Communications, which also includes Newsletters.
Challenges
There are several P1 issues with Messaging as it pertains to the school administrator, who is the primary user:
It's not clear when to use Messages vs Announcements; they're on separate tabs but the same format
Its very easy for admins to accidentally send a family message to staff and vice versa
When sending a family message, the badges to guide the "from whom" selection are incredibly confusing
There are no "draft" messages — admins are interrupted often, so they end up needing to rewrite
Given how widely adopted and heavily used Messaging is, the pain caused by these issues are pervasive and the impact is high.
Below are a few screenshots that show the experience before we made changes.
Data analyses showed that customers using messaging are much more likely to retain with brightwheel. With retention being a top company priority in 2024, we aligned on optimizing this feature as a key opportunity to move the needle on our retention goal.
Our solution was very much grounded in reducing customer pain, but we needed to understand what problems to solve first.
Questions to answer
What does a best-in-class messaging feature look like for administrators?
What problems are we not solving for today via our current offering?
What impact does messaging have on satisfaction and retention?
What problems are most important to solve first?
What technical debt exists that might challenge our ability to move quickly to solve these problems?
Research
We run a quarterly survey to understand satisfaction with each of the core capabilities that brightwheel offers. Messaging was the most important feature, and the one with the most problems.
We then reached out to a select number of respondents for interviews, to dive deeper on their challenges.
We also validated our takeaways with internal team stakeholders.
Wireframes, Comparative Research & Validation
There are many companies that do messaging, so we explored comparatives as inspiration
We then wire-framed concepts to show customers and get feedback (a few screens shown below)
We also partnered with engineering and other business stakeholders to validate and to understand technical constraints.
Based on feedback, we iterated towards higher fidelity designs and broke the project into shippable milestones to deliver value to customers faster.
Genna Smyth 2024