Teachers Pay Teachers

A personal project to add a detailed earnings option to the TpT app.

My Role

End-to-end UX/UI Designer

Process

1

Define

Developed the brief

Designed challenges

1 Define

Project Overview

The TpT app only provides a snapshot of top sales over the past thirty days at any given time.  However, it does not show sellers their daily, weekly, or monthly earnings for each product.  This information is only available on the website.

The Challenge

The goal is to add a feature to the TpT app that allows sellers to see their daily, weekly, and monthly earnings on top-selling products.

2 Research

Methodologies & Reasoning

Competitive Market Analysis

I started my research for this project with a CMA, which I ran to compare Teachers Pay Teachers to other peer-to-peer teacher curriculum business apps. I used the CMA to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and features offered by peer-to-peer teacher seller apps.

Survey

I discovered that…

67% of teacher sellers want access to more earnings data made available through the app.

Based on this information, I decided that addressing the pain point of adding more earnings data to the TpT app would prove useful to sellers.

Personas

The typical persona who is a teacher seller on TpT is a teacher who is also a busy mom. Teacher sellers are predominantly female and within the 25-45 age demographic. Teachers live in tight budgets and are overworked and underpaid. Therefore, having a secondary income is pivotal to these teachers to be able to make a livable wage.

User Interviews

I interviewed 5 participants ages 29-45 to get more information about the user’s process and pain points, specifically regarding how they use the TpT app for their curriculum businesses.

Interview Questions

• Do you use the TpT app for your business? If so, how do you use it?

• Is there anything about the app that you wish could be made better or improved upon? If so, what would you change and why?

• What do you think about the current earnings data available through the app?

• Would you like to be able to access more earnings data and sales statistics through the app? If so, what specific data would you like to be able to access?

It was interesting to hear about how different sellers use the app for their businesses.

Ultimately, I decided to introduce more earnings data to the app to give sellers more information at their fingertips while on the go.

3 Ideate

Brainstorming and Sketches

I thought about different ways to approach the problem of adding in more earnings data to the app. One approach was to create a new page where sellers could track specific product stats. This would be great for sellers who are tracking seasonal products versus evergreen items. However, it would also require more work from each individual. Ultimately, I decided this route was too complicated to fit with the persona of the busy teacher mom entrepreneur who is short on time. So, I decided to work within the existing TpT app framework to add in three specific earnings views for each trending product: daily, weekly, and monthly. Each of these views will be accompanied by a line graph to show a visual representation of sales data.

I looked at TpT’s design guidelines and copied a few of their screens from my own personal shop to make sure I understood their aesthetic.

Below you can see the general user flow of the prototype.

4 Test

High Fidelity Prototype

Per my research, users wanted access to more earnings data via the TpT app. So, I added in a feature that would showcase earnings data daily, weekly, and monthly for each trending product. Each view is accompanied by a line graph to show a visual representation of sales changes over the specified period of time.

Reflection

You made it!

Thank you for reading… ALL the way to the end.