KUBO - showcase | Titus Kartika

44772673_305223876990731_232317766901904

Redesign an accessible school management software for teachers in remote areas in The Gambia, with limited connectivity and resources

2022 • Low-tech • Sustainable • UX research • UX / UI

Overview

My volunteering time for KUBO wasn’t just about design project. It was an adventure I’ll never forget. I got a fun opportunity as UX UI Designer to optimize KUBO, a school management software that works without internet connection.

This powerful yet low-tech software helps teachers and school staff in isolated areas, managing their students' scores and administration.

Constraints

remote area
low connectivity
limited electricity
desktop

Specific

It's a volunteer project
When: May 2022 - December 2022
Scope: I redesigned some parts of the software

Goals

Making it easier for teachers to plan lessons and school events
Simplify input student data and scores
Save teachers time to create digital students reports
Allow teachers continue working even the connectivity is weak or unrealiable
Focus on providing the essential features teachers need

My roles

UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher

Output

✔ 3 new features:

feature to filter students based on certain categories
dashboard to see overview of school administration
freature to track student progress fast

✔ Simpler device for limited electricity

✔ More intuitive experience

✔ Design documentation

Team

1 Project Manager
1 UX/UI Designer
4 Developpers
3 Marketers

Outcomes

✔ Teachers and school staff can plan lessons and school events more efficiently

✔ Teachers can work within the software with unreliable electricity

✔ Design system to hand over easily to developers and the next UX UI Designer.

(What improved)

After redesign

Process

Problem

Research

Solutions

The current situation

Even when KUBO operates, school staffs are still overwhelmed with some manual tasks

With expensive and weak internet, teachers and school staff in The Gambia have no choice but to rely on paper for almost everything. Manually analyze students' scores, track students' progress, sort students, and manage school administration. Slow and tiring process. Worst of all, when floods occur. It destroyed the written records, adding their frustration.

Though KUBO has eased some challenges especially data entry, teachers and school staff were still overwhelmed with some administrative tasks. Consequently, they still hardly focus on the main task, which is teaching.

A gambian teacher is teaching in the classroom in Albreda, an isolated area in The Gambia

The Gambian pupils in isolated area, Albreda

Learning activities at Albreda school.

Lack of electricity and internet.

Users' tasks = users' pains

Imagine your job descriptions were some headache-including activities.That's exactly what I discovered during face-to-face interviews and usability tests with KUBO users.

Here were what slow them down:

🔍 Filtering students manually

Users still create student lists based on certain categories manually, either on paper or using offline computers, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

📊 Analyze students' progress manually

To track and analyse student progress is still done manually, making the process slow and time-consuming.

📅 Track school activities manually

To track school activities and administration, users still do it manually through papers-based book and external platforms.

13203D0D-2B09-45DD-ABED-7AD9228930A6 (1).jpeg

Some students' scores and school administrations are written manually on paper.

Exploration

Research: usability test & interview

Before my visit to The Gambia, Suwaibahtou, the amazing headmaster of The Swallow School shared a worry with me on video call."Our teachers were overwhelmed by manual student sorting". So, I came up with 2 questions in mind:

What categories should be on students' filter feature?

What other tasks that users still do manually and exhaust them?

To dig deeper, I interviewed 4 teachers and 1 headmaster. Every single one felt overwhelmed by manual student sorting. They have to put so much effort into sorting students by age, language, and gender. Whether for school activities, learning subjects, events, administration, and special needs.

The student categories they often need to sort:

by age
by language
by gender

Users also struggle with:

Manually reviewing school activities to prepare their to-do list
Identifying the students quickly with low scores in certain subjects, to prepare lessons and extra supports for them
Using KUBO software. Some depend on others to navigate and use the features
Manually analyzing student performance.

The steps

Step 1

DETERMINE GOALS

To understand the process how users find students based on certain categories
To understand what features KUBO can improve and provide to help them to complete tasks?

Step 2

DEFINE TARGET USERS

Teachers in The Swallow school and Albreda school
School staff in The Swallow school and Albreda school
Age: 25-55 years old
Has a computer or laptop
Doesn't have a computer or laptop
Genders: all genders
English speakers
English speakers and local language speakers
Ethnicity: all tribes in The Gambia

Step 3

WRITE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How often do you use a computer or laptop?

Where?
What do you do on a computer?

2. How often do you use KUBO platform?

3. Let's say, you need to find all students who are 9-14 years old and speak the Mandika language. Can you show me how you find them on KUBO? Is it easy or frustrating?

4. Our team plans to add a filter feature to help you to find students with certain categories. What categories should exist? Such as grade, tribe, language, and what else?

5. What do you expect KUBO to help you more?

Step 4

RECRUITE PARTICIPANTS

5 participants are chosen based on the requirements we had defined. To respect confidentiality, I don't show their real name and age.
Isatou, 42 years old headmaster of a school in The Gambia , has a personal laptop and personal wifi to work and do personal activities
Aja, a 33 years old teacher in an isolated school in Albreda who doesn't have a laptop and still learn to operate the KUBO platform
Muhammad, a 50-year-old teacher in an isolated school in Albreda who doesn't have a laptop or computer, still follows training on how to operate a computer
Ousmane, 27 years old, lives in an isolated area in Albreda, doesn't have a laptop or computer, and follows training on how to operate a computer.
Adame, 47 years old teacher, lives in an isolated area, doesn't have a laptop or computer, and has followed training on how to use KUBO.

Overcome the cultural barriers to get honest feedback

Getting honest feedback from Gambian participants took more time than Europeans. Europeans are more direct in telling what they liked, disliked, and what confused them. Meanwhile, our Gambian participants were much more polite and seemed to avoid critical feedback, as they saw it as rude.

I tested KUBO with Gambian teachers and a headmaster. They often said "everything was good", but they struggled to accomplish tasks. So I slowed down.

We shared lunch in the Gambian way: one big food plate for 3-6 people. Our team, Gambian teachers, and school staff ate together, had long discussions, tea, and got to know each other over several days.

I restarted a user test, to ask for their honest feedback. I kept encouraging them that even if they gave negative feedback, it would still be useful to improve the software and help their work. I felt so happy that I eventually earned their trust. They were open in sharing feedback.

Challenge

Screenshot 2026-10-07 at 16.26_edited.jp

Lessons I learnt

User test needs cultural awareness
Adapting the approach to how participants communicate in a comfortable way
User test is not just about asking the right questions. It's about creating an environment where people feel comfortable answering honestly.

Our new normal: chaos

We came to The Gambia with schedules for 14 days. But every day, I laughed at our schedule. Everything ran late. Flat tires, a broken taxi, waiting for another taxis, and the ferry that came late.

Having breakfast was like an adventure. We asked the local where to find a shop and we ended up following him to do his house tour, listening to his family story, and seeing his peacock.

Walking around? It's such expeditions. Some random Gambians followed us and asked for our phone numbers or money. Some nice locals invited us to have tea and chat. The red dust got everywhere: my bag, my clothes, and inside my nose. The proper internet connection we had was in our homestay in the capital city, Serrekunda.

This kind of randomness has become our new normal in The Gambia. But above all, we had so much fun :)

375553879_10223522999682503_689962599. jpg.jpg

Challenge

Brainstorm & insights

Back in Belgium with a super-fast internet connection and a fresh brain full of ideas, I dove into the brainstorm.

The next question that popped up in my head:

What features and elements to help KUBO's users?

Goals

I collect insights from similar products on internet because I wanted to find out what features commonly exist in the school management platforms.

Also, to find inspirations how these platforms handle the 3 frustrations of users to:

filtering students
tracking progress
and to track school administration in a fast way.

Competitors

Features & elements

We currently don't find any competitor that provides free software (digital platform) without internet connection for schools in isolated areas.

But, KUBO works similarly with prepaid school platforms, such as:

SMP (School Management Platform)
Laravel School Management Platform
Power School

During my observations of those school management software, I discovered some elements and features that could be added to the KUBO platform to help teachers and headmasters address their ongoing challenges.

Those are:

Overview or dashboard of the activities and administration of the school
On the student page, there is data about their parents' occupation, blood group, and someone who can be contacted if there's an urgent matter
On the menu, there are: academic calendar
Add photos of each student and teacher.

User personas

After interviewing KUBO users, I created 3 user personas to represent KUBO's users with different backgrounds and needs. From tech-savvy to old-school teacher, these personas helped us to design with real people in mind.

Isatou

42 years old

headmaster and teacher

lives in Serrekunda

Pains:

To overview administration of schools, she needs to open it in several platforms.

Goals:

To know and analyse fast the school administration and actvities
Able to know all features in Kubo platform

Ida

35 years old

teacher

lives in Serrekunda

Pains:

To track her students' progress, she needs to open each student's profile and analyze it manually
Still learning using computer (lack of digital skill)

Goals:

Quickly evaluate her students progress and then adapt her teaching methods effectively.

Ahmed

50 years old

English teacher

lives in Serrekunda

Pains:

Still learn how to operate computer, newbie in digital
Struggle to create manually a list of students who speak Wollof and have bad scores in English lessons

Goals:

Spend more time preparing and delivering extra English lessons.
Use KUBO independently without relying on others.

"How can I design KUBO works good in isolated areas?"

With the constraints KUBO has currently: operates in isolated areas with weak and expensive internet connections, I came up with a question:

Around the same time, I attended a webinar and read some articles about sustainable design in UX UI. It opened my eyes that sustainable design principles can help me in designing KUBO. It's about creating digital products that are efficient and also accessible in any condition.

The sustainable design strategy

Minimalist design by reducing unnecessary elements, animations, and heavy graphics
Dark mode
Prioritize essential features: focus on features that truly matter for the users.

These strategies do more than declutter the interface, but also reduce power consumption, which is crucial in areas with unstable electricity.

Turned out that designing a digital product for isolated areas is not a limitation. For me, it’s a design challenge I’m totally in 💪✨

Key insights

💡 Simplify the process of creating reports

To help teachers focus more on teaching and tailor the lessons for students.

💡 Allow users to get an overview of school activities and data quickly without jumping across multiple platforms

To save users' time to create to-do list
To boost users' productivity

💡 Provide a feature to sort students based on certain categories

To save users time sorting students by age, language, tribe, and gender.

To reduce frustration in organizing school events, activities, administrative needs, extra lessons, and special needs.

💡 Provide help / guidance feature

To help users navigate Kubo independently, without relying on colleagues
To increase users' confidence.

💡Allows teachers to identify quickly students who need extra support

To help teachers prepare quicker extra lessons for students who have low performance.

Solutions & impacts

Based on the user pain points, the insights of the usability test and what users need

Before

☹️ This login does not seem to have a brand color and brand voice.

After

✅️ A minimalist design because our users are still learning to use computers. We want them to assume at first glance, that "it is easy to use KUBO" and get motivated.

✅️ A jargon to tell users the benefits of using KUBO.

View the prototype

✅️ Username for login because some teachers don’t have email addresses/ Only the developer and school admins have the access to add new users to KUBO software.

Before

☹️ The selected menu looks not clickable. That might confuse users if it's an active element or not.

☹️ Icons don't represent the menu list. As a result, it slows down users to read it

After

✅️ I group the menu list to help users find what they are looking for faster.

✅️ I highlight the selected menu to create a clear visual hierarchy that helps users navigate quickly to the page they are on.

✅️ I use icons that can represent the menu itself, which can help users to scan the pages:

My Students: with an icon of a user with a graduation cap
School Administration: with an icon of a list
Academic Calender: with a calendar icon

View the prototype

☹️ Teachers and headmasters struggle to overview important information quickly. Every morning, they need to open some platforms, including their notebooks and Excel.

Before

There is no dashboard

After

✅️ New feature: School activity dashboard. Now users can get a quick overview of students' attendance, the academic calendar, and their to-do list. No need to open multiple platforms. This feature lets users know faster what's going on before making plans.

The content is based on what the headmasters and teachers mostly need daily.

View the prototype

Before

☹️ Unclear hierarchy. It slows users down when scanning the info in the table.

☹️ Users like Ahmed are stuck filtering students by hand, either writing it down on paper or creating lists on their computer. Our software only has a basic search function, but no filtering. Users still need to put in a lot of effort for a simple task: filtering students.

☹️ Some users are not familiar with the icons or symbols for the two genders. It slows them down when scanning the info.

After

✅️ Filter feature lets users d quickly find students based on grade, age, tribe, language, and gender. A seamless step for organizing events, lessons, and administration. These categories were carefully chosen from teacher feedback during our research.

✅️ Replace the gender icon into text "female" or "male". The gender icons aren't widely recognized in The Gambia. This simple change will make users scan the gender info faster.

Before

☹️The hierarchy is not clear, so users take some times to read it.

After

✅️ A clear hierarchy on the student's profile to help users to scan the info and quickly find what they are looking for.

✅️ Add a class status (on badge) "Grade 4" after the student's name. These two are the most important info on a student's profile. It can help users to identify a student faster.

✅️ Clickable grade. It gives users the option to access and view quickly the student list of that specific grade.

View the prototype

Before

☹️ Users (represented by Ida) struggle to track students' progress, which they still do it manually. They open each student's reports and then analyze it.

☹️ Not clear which one is the button. Users were confused about where to view and print the report.

After

✅ A new feature "Student Performance Overview" for each student and each lesson. Now teachers can scan their students' performance effortlessly without opening each lesson manually.

With a glance, green means "doing good", red means "needs improvement", progress bar and percentage.

View the prototype

✅ Rename "Print" button to a "View" button to represent the action itself and to calm users who just want to see the report ducument first before print it.

Dark mode & sustainable design

I redesigned KUBO platform with dark mode. A change that saves power, which is important in places with limited electricity, like schools in The Gambia.

By using less bright light on the screen, dark mode helps KUBO run longer without draining the battery. And as a bonus, it’s easier on the eyes for users during those long-hardworking hours.

View the prototype

Before

After

Outcomes

✔ Teachers and school staff can plan lessons and school events more efficient

✔ Teachers can work within the software with unreliable electricity

✔ Design documentation to handover easily to developers and the next UX UI Designer.

View the prototype

What I learned

Considering the technology constraints

We only have four developers as volunteers, the limited electricity with solar panels, and the unstable internet connection in The Gambia.

It takes more time to get information from the school staffs and to develop new features. So, patience is key.

I felt slapped right in my face many times

Before going to The Gambia, I often compared my life in Indonesia, "a third-world country" to Europe. Indonesia always seemed left behind in education, science, and technology in modern days. But when I visited The Gambia, I realized how lucky I was to have had access to technology and a good education from a young age. Even though it may not have been the best, I still had more access than many.

In The Gambia, I met people around 5 to 50 years old who were incredibly happy because we set up computer classes in their villages. It was their first time ever using a computer!

The harddest part

Seeing how little some locals had. Kids asked for food while we ate. Teachers showed us school toilets that were just a dark room with smelly holes in the ground.

Our mission expanded. From improving the digital platform to raise money to fix basic infrastructure, starting with toilets. Yup, the trip was chaotic, but it was indeed eye-opening and unforgettable. 💕

Next improvement

How to sort students based on scores

We take more time to design a feature for teachers' need that help them finding students based on scores. In order to take immediate action such as providing students additional support to improve.

Developing

Now I'm teaming up with the developers to bring this design to life. Stay tuned ✨

Breadcrumb navigation

This handy feature acts like a guide, helping users know exactly where they are and track their steps. No more confusion or second-guessing where they are.

Help feature

This could be a solution for users (represented by Ahmed) who are newbie to use computers, to use KUBO software and who often ask their colleagues for assistance.

By providing a simple Help feature with frequently asked question, users could be more independent and not always relying on others to help them.