Teachers Pay Teachers

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

Collage of six screenshot images showing a dashboard with earnings of $122.38, product information, and user profile in a mobile app, with a focus on reading response task cards with 100 questions for any novel.
Collage of four screenshots of a dashboard and app interface showing earnings, followers, and sales for a reading response task card product, with a profile picture and navigation icons visible.

My Role

End-to-end UX/UI Designer

Tools

Figma, Canva, Adobe XD, Anima

Timeline

Two Weeks

Black and white icon of a person.
Black and white icon of a criss-crossed wrench and screwdriver.
Black and white icon of a clock.

Process

1

Define

Developed the brief

Designed challenges

2

Research

Competitive Market Analysis

Personas

Survey

User Interviews

3

Ideate

Sketches

Wireframes

4

Test

High Fidelity Prototype

Usability Test

Design Iterations

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

Flowchart with icons and text describing a process: 1. Bar chart icon labeled 'Competitive Market Analysis' with text about completing a CMA to see how other teachers use seller platform apps. 2. Speech bubble icon labeled 'Survey' with text about running a survey to understand how sellers interact with the app. 3. Person icon labeled 'Personas' with text about defining oneself as a persona to run a business. 4. Group icon labeled 'User Interviews' with text about interviewing teachers to find pain points and improve survey design.

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.

Comparison chart of different education companies highlighting features, strengths, and weaknesses, including TpT, Classful, Super Teacher Worksheets, Education.com, Twinkl, Having Fun Teaching, and TES.

Survey

Dashboard with survey data and analytics charts showing user activity and feedback preferences for the TpT app, including pie charts of usage frequency, access to earnings data, business uses, and reasons for wanting more earnings data.

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.

I also learned that…

Users want to see product earnings from “today,” “this week,” and “this month.”

Adding these earnings “views” of trending products can help teacher sellers use the TpT app more efficiently to operate their businesses.

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.

A bio profile for Meredith Dobbs, showing her photo with a woman and a girl, her age, education, hometown, family details, and occupation, with sections outlining her goals and frustrations related to her side business and use of technology.

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?

A presentation slide titled "What I Realized..." with green text emphasizing empathy in user journey design. The slide contains six speech bubbles with quotes about user needs and challenges, featuring a head outline with gears inside, symbolizing thinking or problem-solving.

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.

Hand-drawn mobile app wireframes for a project titled 'Tip App' with date 1/10/23. The first screen shows a rectangular placeholder for an image or icon, a button labeled 'menu', and a graph. The second screen features sections labeled 'Product' with an image and 'daily sales,' 'weekly,' and 'monthly' listings with sketches. The third screen lists 'Product Name,' 'Daily Earnings,' 'Weekly Earnings,' 'Monthly Summary,' and 'cell phone icon,' with boxes indicating content or navigation elements.
Hand-drawn wireframes of three iPhone screens displaying a project plan for a to-do app. The screens include sketches of graphs, pie charts, and text labels such as 'Today, Month, Year,' 'Product,' 'Earnings,' and 'most efficient iteration'.

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.

Screenshot of a mobile app dashboard showcasing sales analytics, product listings, and earnings. The dashboard features sections labeled 'My Dashboard' and 'Trending Sales,' with visual representations of sales data, product images, and revenue figures.

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

A slide titled 'Takeaways' from a presentation, featuring two sections labeled 'Impact' and 'What I learned.' The Impact section discusses how app changes help teacher sellers use data to make better marketing decisions and increase profit margins. The What I Learned section notes teacher sellers' desire for more data access via phone app to improve marketing decisions.
Next steps for improving usability studies: 1. Conduct another round of usability tests to validate pain point addressing. 2. Conduct user research to identify new needs and integrate earnings data beyond trending sales. 3. Consult engineers on handoff procedures and needs.

You made it!

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