TeachX Task Assistant App - UI/UX Design

🏆1st Place Hackathon winners:

⭐️ Best Prototype
⭐️ Best Landing Page
⭐️ Best Logo Design

During the fall of 2017, I had a wonderful opportunity to participate in a 48-hour hackathon challenge hosted by Goodie Nation, a startup accelerator organization in Atlanta, Georgia.

I collaborated with an amazing team that swept the competition’s grand prize categories from Best App Prototype and Marketing Platform, even down to Best Logo and visual design, by yours truly. We all enjoyed working together, racing against time and bringing the TeachX mobile app to life. We hope it will be a great start toward creating much needed relief for over-allocated teachers and assist marginalized students more.

The Challenge

Within 48 hours, our masterful team (having never met before) partnered up and threw ourselves into the fire designing and successfully building out the TeachX app prototype. We also created a handy landing page to provide an overview of the app’s core functionality. It’s like a Task Rabbit app but for teacher’s helpers, and the “helpers” are professional experts of their respective “tasks” that connect within a school’s regional community.

To name a few examples… If a teacher is over-allocated, a helper (an expert established within the community program) can assist with grading papers, give career talks or maybe provide expert demonstrations caring for the classroom pet. If there are specific student behavioral issues or bullying, there’s opportunity for a teacher to schedule an immediate request for vetted professional counselors or a social worker to give talks to students in detention. The TeachX founder ensured this program has a full process strategy established along with a security implementation plan where it could potentially work within local school systems that adopt the app service.

The Branding

The founder wanted to maintain the essence of her original “busy bee” theme and keep the classroom aesthetic as a familiar look to teachers. While much of the artful classroom styles can be playful and fun, it can also feel busy in a way that’s overwhelming. I felt it was important to keep the logo minimal along with the overall brand look and feel. The design’s emphasis on geometric shapes help play off of the bee honeycomb structure as a visual narrative for connecting the community of users. By saturating the pops of color, also based off the founder’s original palette, the app refresh still upheld to the vibrant schoolhouse feel without compromising its market to adult users. Keeping the iconography system clean and consistent was also high priority to provide seamless way-finding for users and limit hangups when navigating.

The Hackathon Champions

Our rockstar team included the TeachX founder, Monique Nunnely, UXers, Tien-Tien Cheng and Eric Palm, as well as web developers, marketing experts and myself. We were able to successfully prototype, design, and pitch our concept to 6 different panels of industry experts in the last remaining hours of the hackathon at the Atlanta Google office.

The TeachX “teacher experience” app will revolutionize the teacher’s aid experience and immersive learning processes for all by connecting students, educators and professional experts within reach of their respective diverse communities. We hope this is an effective first step that will solve real world problems for our underserved educators especially within marginalized neighborhoods, and also open up more safe spaces for those involved in local school systems.

Before and after app redesign and new branding — *Before (left) and after app redesign and new branding (right)*

GoTeachX.org

⏯ Held at Google's Atlanta office, this 48 hour hackathon featured volunteer UI/UX Designers, Digital Marketers, Web Designers and Graphic Designers who joined the startups in the Hack The Violence Pre-Accelerator to turn their ideas into clickable products, landing pages, logos, user acquisition strategies, and revenue models.