THE CHALLENGE
About
MyTutor is the UK’s leading online platform for one-to-one learning. Our product facilitates virtual learning and hundreds of tutoring sessions a day, and aims to improve the educational outcomes of thousands of young people.
In early 2022, MyTutor acquired FireTech, a company offering tutoring, mentoring and training in all things tech – like Python, Java, AI and more. This acquisition aimed to retain more students through the summer by providing a broader learning experience, particularly in co-curriculum and tech-focused areas. We were tasked to evaluate how well FireTech's offering fits with MyTutor, and whether our audience is interested in different types of tuition.
The problem
For the business - Seasonality and customer retention
We're losing users. The nature of our product means it is only relevant during a specific time of the year, resulting in a significant drop in customer retention during the Summer months.
For the students - Study gaps caused by Covid-19 & cost of living crisis
Our teachers, parents and students themselves have been reporting a significant increase in learning gaps and the need for additional support post-Covid. 1-2-1 tutoring was also seen as too expensive for some.
Looking at the data
~30%
drop in MoM student retention in the Summer months
~70%
Parent say they use MyTutor to mainly get their children ready for exams
<50%
Spend on MT is <50% what parent spends on learning support
Our goal
Define how group and co-curricular tuition can best support students over the Summer holidays in order to increase student engagement and retention.
Our success metrics
800 seats sold by the end of the Summer
20% of courses available at launch are co-curricular
Eligible, reliable tutors can sign up to teach Group courses via our web app without additional support.
My team & my role
I led research and design, closely collaborating with the squad’s product manager, tech and QA leads, and a group of business stakeholders across our tutors, demand generation and project management teams.
TL,DR: The solution
In just under eight weeks of designing, testing, and building a new part of our product (often all at once!), we successfully launched the MyTutor x FireTech Summer Group courses on a new web app.
As a small bonus, we also improved the Groups tutor onboarding process, making it simpler for tutors to pick and book the courses they want to teach. We also upgraded our admin tools for creating and publishing new courses, stramlining the process further.
By the time we were done, the Groups product was entirely self-sufficient, enabling our Ops and Marketing teams to manage courses without relying on engineering or product input. This meant they were able to operate more efficiently and drive meaningful outcomes for the business as a result.
Please note - the below case study only covers the customer-facing part of the project. If you want to learn more, reach out!
Results
157
Summer Groups courses run during the Summer holidays
681
Total seats sold - most demand was for curricular courses
30%
of courses available were our FireTech co-curricular courses
4/5
Groups customer satisfaction score
Our design process: Discovery
Project kick-off
I worked closely with my PM to organise and run the project kick-off session with our engineers and the wider stakeholder team. Our main goal for this session was to refine the scope of the project - limited time before Summer holidays meant we only had 8 weeks to design and update our product to support curriculum and co-curriculum group courses.
Below are just some of the challenges we were tasked to solve:
Collaborating with tutor, demand generation and project management teams, we quickly split these challenges into smaller, more manageable groups. This helped us to define the project scope for us as a product team better. Our main priorities were:
Understanding parent and student expectations for tuition over Summer
Enabling the product to offer different schedule, size, and format group courses (in order to include co-curricular FireTech courses)
Designing and building customer booking journeys for FireTech and MyTutor courses.
User research
To find out if co-curricular learning is something our customers are interested in, and how they feel about tuition over Summer, I ran a mix of qual and quant research with our customers. Flick through the slides below to find out our key insights.
Mapping out the user flows
At the beginning of the project, I also mapped out the user flows for both MyTutor and FireTech booking journeys. This process helped me identify the key differences between the two flows and determine the features needed to accommodate both types of courses within one MyTutor Groups product.
Wireframing and testing
Combining FireTech and MyTutor group course offering in a cohesive way
We faced several challenges in aligning the differences between FireTech and MyTutor courses, which made grouping and promoting them together quite difficult:
FireTech lessons were organized by age group, whereas MyTutor grouped them by level.
FireTech courses were significantly more expensive.
FireTech didn’t assign specific tutors to courses, while MyTutor did.
Prototype testing with our customers
Aiming to better understand how best to present FireTech and MyTutor courses together, we tested some early stage prototypes with parents and students.
Our findings
Parents don’t tend to look for ‘curricular’ and ‘co-curricular’ subjects when browsing - they need specific categories to find a course that they want.
Parents don’t explore the content on the landing page. Instead, they navigate directly to the course list and start filtering for what they want.
Parents and students want to know who will be running the course - and who will be attending it too.
The outcome
Based on the testing findings, and using our Design System components for speed of design and development, I created high fidelity designs and collaborated with engineers on implementing it them as well as testing the final solution.
Customer journey mapping post-launch
When we launched our Summer Groups offering and product in August 2022, we established multiple feedback channels to gather continuous input from our users—parents, students, and tutors. I also conducted interviews with several customers who booked a course to gain deeper insights into their experience with our product.
Combining this feedback with product analytics and usage data, I was able created a detailed customer journey map that captured both the customer and tutor experiences. These maps helped us to identify the key user pain points and opportunity areas in order to improve MyTutor Groups experience in the future.
Reflections
Reflecting on this project, I really enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with the FireTech team and contribute to introducing a new type of offering to MyTutor. It was particularly rewarding to work across all aspects of the project, from designing the customer and tutor experiences to improving the admin tools that powered the product.
Through this process, I learned the importance of involving engineering early in the project. Introducing FireTech courses in MyTutor turned out to be more technically complex than we imagined, and early collaboration helped us navigate those challenges really well. Working under tight deadlines meant we were often designing and building in parallel, and leveraging existing tools and solutions rather than building everything from scratch was key.