The Melanin Village

How can we improve user experience to strengthen Sisterhood?

The Melanin Village is centered on supporting Black and Brown mothers by providing a rich homeschooling experience for their children.

Role: Lead UX Researcher

Team: Product Strategy (6), UX Researchers (6), UX Writers (6), UX Designers (6), Solutions Architects (6)

Scope: 14 weeks

Tools: Figjam

Methods: Competitive analysis, segment personas, user surveys, affinity mapping, in depth interviews, usability testing

The Melanin Village would like to improve its user experience. Current community members, known as Sisters, deal with many frustrations navigating the various platforms leading to low adoption and retention.

Overall Project Goals:

  • Streamline The Melanin Village Sister's access to the community, resources, and events

  • Reduce the number of manual actions that The Melanin Village admins/moderators have to take to manage the logistics, operations, Village communication, and content

Current Phase Goals:

  • Understand the current state of The Melanin Village

  • Identify the most impactful pain points to the user journey

  • Highlight business opportunities based on data

  • Conduct research that will inform the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and inform research and design for future phases

Discovery

The Melanin Village is a growth-centered gathering space that provides curriculum and community for Black and Brown homeschoolers. Founder and project client, Brenaea Fairchilds created the community to connect marginalized families who felt frustrated by the public school system. These families share a goal of wanting their children in a parent-led learning environment that is safe and provides a true depiction of their history and opportunities.

To achieve Phase 0 goals, we needed to:

  • Understand The Melanin Village’s market position

  • Understand target and current users’ needs and motivations on The Melanin Village as a community and a platform

  • Understand how current users utilize The Melanin Village platform

Questions that derived from these goals are:

  • What other products are similar to The Melanin Village?

  • How do current users navigate the platform?

  • What are current and potential user’s needs and motivations in reference to this community?

I worked with an apprentice on completing a competitive analysis and feature comparison matrix. We compared Gather Round and Power Homeschool (direct competitors), Skillshare and Facebook (indirect competitors), and Coursera and The Good and the Beautiful (substitute competitors). We gathered valuable data that gave us a grasp on how The Melanin Village compared in the market, along with opportunities to consider.

Notable takeaways:

  • The Melanin Village’s users wholeheartedly believe in its mission

  • The community is a niche, which has its pros and cons

    • Pros - less competition, loyal customers, ability to adapt to audience

    • Cons - small customer base, growth, and expansion can be limited

  • There is a general lack of clarity around what The Melanin Village provides vs. what it does not provide

Areas of Opportunity:

  • Improve brand identity and develop a design system

  • Simplify the registration process and improve onboarding

  • Provide curricula previews and an option to purchase directly

How are current users actually using the community?

There are approximately 250 paying users in The Melanin Village. We needed to understand how they were actually using the platform. I worked alongside another apprentice where we immersed ourselves in the community’s data and analytics to create segment personas.

The specific data we analyzed were:

  • Join date

  • Post clicks and creation

  • Visits

  • Total contributions

Each segment persona highlighted different opportunites we could take to demonstrate The Melanin Villages value to users.

  • Advocate User

    This user visits the village multiple times a day, has the most followers, and engages most with sisters through DMs, comments, cheers (or likes), and attending events. She is a big proponent of homeschooling.

    We have a tremendous opportunity to harness their passion to strengthen the Melanin Village brand and increase membership. We would encourage them to mention the village to their social and personal networks.

  • Active User

    This user visits The Village multiple times a week and follows others closely, but rarely engages with them directly. She has a high click rate, but low engagement with comments and DMs.

    We can encourage the Active user to increase her engagement in The Melanin Village. This may be achieved by streamlining and honing in on information that is relevant to her.

  • Passive User

    This user spends most of her time reading/clicking posts but not commenting or connecting with anyone directly. She generally visits the Village about 1-2 times a week, but her visits drop off on average after about 2 months.

    There is an opportunity to motivate Passive users to increase their engagement. Consider targeted outreach to these users, encouraging them to sign in and utilize some of the benefits of the site.

  • First Time User

    There are instances where First time users visit at least one additional time after their original join date within a 3-month period, however, many are not revisiting after their initial account creation.

    This group consists mostly of users who attended the Sister Pass Weekend. Very few have converted to paying members. There is an opportunity to learn more about the root of their hesitation in joining the community through in-depth interviews.

User Surveys

We conducted a user survey to:

  • Learn how often the sisters are using the various platforms

  • Learn how the sisters navigate accessing resources

  • Understand the pros & cons of being a sister in the Village

    Our finalized survey was created for current sisters and potential sisters. Following our survey distribution plan, our client sent the survey out to her mailing list of 13.5k emails and her 48k Instagram followers. We received 450 responses. 36 were current users.

After administering the survey, we scheduled an affinity mapping workshop where the team identified themes and trends based on user responses. We identified seven major trends among users: confusion, connection, cost, dislikes about homeschooling curriculum, likes about homeschooling curriculum, praises, and features.

Notable Takeaways

Potential Users:

  • When potential sisters were asked if they’ve participated in a Sister pass weekend or a conference:

    • 43% said they did not attend

    • 27% were not familiar at all with the Sister Pass weekend

  • The cost of The Village is consistently named as a barrier to joining

We hypothesized that there is more opportunity with the Sister Pass Weekend. Increasing awareness can help potential users learn more about the benefits of the Village. There is also an opportunity to further understand through in-depth interviews why individuals chose not to attend the Sister Pass Weekend.

Current Users:

Despite many of the current users saying they love the resources the Village includes, a majority stated they were not comfortable with navigating the resources. When asked how often they use the various platforms the Village hosts content on, most said they never use it.

We recognize that the 36 respondents represented only 14.4% of paid users, so we would like to target this group for additional survey responses. We would also set up in-depth interviews with this group to get more detailed information about their use of the Village.

Challenges

As we engaged in the discovery/exploration phase, we hit a few roadblocks with understanding the direction to go with the current tech stack and how that information will impact the MVP. Our team did not include a Solutions Architect, so we consulted with digital strategists and development mentors to help guide the team around technological needs. Additionally, since this was a volunteer project, our time and resources were limited. We chose research methodologies that gave us data that could inform the MVP and understand users at no cost.

Recommendations for the next phase of the project include:

  • Jobs to be done analysis to further define customer’s needs

  • In depth interviews to gain detailed information on user’s behaviors and motivations

  • Usability testing

Next

NMSI Launch Fellowship