Homework Helper
A go-to resource for parents and guardians supporting elementary math education.
Audience: Parents & Guardians | Teachers | Students
Responsibilities: UX Research | Content Design | Prototyping | Visual Design
Tools Used: Figma | Notion | Canva | Adobe Illustrator | ChatGPT
Overview
Many parents struggle to support their children’s math homework due to unfamiliar teaching methods and a lack of accessible resources. Homework Helper bridges this gap by offering AI-generated instructional videos, interactive images, and text-based guidance—making learning engaging for both parents and students.
Design Thinking Process
Approach:
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Empathy: Learning about audience and user research
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Define: Redefining and focusing on the questions based on my insights
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Ideate: Card sorting, Information architecture and user flow
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Design: Wire framing, creating final designs and prototype
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Test: User testing and validating from users
During the empathize phase, our group, comprised of former teachers, collectively drew on our classroom experiences to assess common challenges faced by parents supporting their children’s learning at home. Through discussions, we identified key weaknesses in existing resources, including:
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A lack of accessible, user-friendly tools tailored for parents.
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Mismatches between classroom teaching methods and at-home support materials.
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Limited engagement for students in traditional study resources.
Empathy
Define
Fostering content knowledge in mathematics at home is essential for student success. Often, children or children’s guardians lack mathematical content knowledge and skills to assist in students’ learning experiences, leading to challenges for homework and at-home practice for children
Ideate
Brainstorming sessions generated ideas such as:
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A platform where parents can track their child’s progress and get personalized suggestions based on performance.
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After evaluating the ideas, we decided to focus on creating a mix of interactive content, personalized support, and tools to help parents track progress.
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Interactive lessons with AI-generated images and videos that break down complex concepts.
Prototype and Testing
Prototyping for this project was a collaborative and iterative process. My team began with low-fidelity wireframes to outline key features and gather initial feedback. Using tools like Figma, we created interactive mockups to simulate user flows and visual layouts.
This phase allowed us to test functionality, identify pain points, and make adjustments based on user input. While some features required multiple iterations, the feedback helped us refine our design to better align with user needs.
Overall, the prototyping experience was an essential step in bridging our ideas to a practical, user-focused solution.
One user suggested to refer to Hermie as a “One Stop Shop” for parents while helping their children with homework
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One parent mentioned how this app would help her feel more confident that she was teaching the most up-to-date methods for
doing math. She said this is a common area where she often feels
unprepared. -
One parent suggested for improving and making this app approachable to users with varying experiences using GenAI
Quantitative Findings
Qualitative Findings
75% of parents said that their child cannot work on their
homework independently
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50% said that they work with their child weekly on homework,
25% said that they work with them daily, -
75% rely on online resources while providing homework support
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100% said that they hope a tool like this will help them understand
their child’s homework content and to reduce homework stress -
25% of parents spend more than two hours on homework
everyday
This project reinforced the importance of accessibility in educational tools, user-centered design, and iterative development to create impactful solutions.