Click Learning Co.

Working to create a system that helps facilitate learning that clicks for both student and teacher

The education system has, over the ages, been one that resists drastic change. The Covid pandemic brought about circumstances that forced everyone involved in public and private education to pivot to online education rapidly. Online Learning, while not unheard of before 2020, became much more widely used, and the technology to adapt to it became much more accessible. Companies had to learn to be quick on their feet to organize and monetize the processes of connecting a student with a teacher to promote their learning. One such company is Click Learning Co, whom we enjoyed working with in April/May 2023.

My team and I met with Sarah Allaire, Founder and CEO of Click Learning Co., on Tuesday, April 18th, over Google Meet. We all came to the meeting with the same purpose: to establish a positive and open communication channel and create a productive professional relationship. We learned what inspired Sarah to form the company and her plans moving forward. Click Learning Company, we found, is a web-based platform that connects K12 students (Kindergarten to 12th Grade) to educators for supplemental education and support based on their educational demands, hobbies, and interests. This is why Sarah named the company “Click”, to highlight the team's passion for bringing together teachers and students who “click” with each other, because they believed so strongly in the student-teacher connection and the impact it has on the learning experience.

As a mother of two children (8 and under), who experienced the transition of classes to online and then hybrid instruction, this subject was something I found myself very passionate around, and I enjoyed tapping into my personal resources and experience to help enrich the research process.

The Click Learning Company, like other Online Learning/Tutoring systems, had identified two main entities that need to be connected: the students (which can also extend to their caregivers handling the online learning logistics on their behalf) and the teachers. My team and I were assigned to work with Click on the Educator Portal section of their website, which is the system intended for use by the teachers. We were also able to meet with the cohort that worked on the parent portal prior to our project, to ensure our design aligned with theirs and would provide a smooth user experience when developed into one cohesive Click Learning system.

When we started working with Click, they had a rudimentary system in place with a handful of users that would allow just enough data to demonstrate a basic pattern of use. They were experiencing drop offs at specific points in the onboarding system for the educators, the graph of which looked like this:

The primary drop off point that the team was concerned about was when the educators had signed up for an account and were awaiting approval to start tutoring. The existing system provided no visibility to the educators regarding their status in the background check, interview and reference check process, resulting in a seeming state of limbo that caused the educator to give up on the system.

We used the data provided in the chart to conduct our heuristic evaluation of the website as follows:

●  We discovered a few violations that stood out to us that needed to be addressed.

We identified some UX violations that needed to be urgently addressed, such as:

● The lack of a main dashboard page once you create an account and log in, resulting in memorability issues.

● The location of the search bar in the footer of the website site which can easily be overlooked and cause some frustration.

● Wec completed the training module for new educators for Click and discovered it had more than 10 screens to click through, none of which indicated the user’s progress through the tutorial, resulting in a seemingly endless experience.

●  And lastly, there was no way to access the educator application through the link on the main navigation.


Employing multiple sources of information, such as input from our client, internet research, discussions with educators in our network, and our own personal experience, we were able to find multiple competitors to use for our market research. Our client recommended Go Student and Canvas. We used Varsity Tutors, which I had come across through my own research, to get private tutoring for my daughter during the pandemic.

Canvas was a good competitor in particular because, like Click Learning, it is a learning management system that offers online teaching and learning and has been implemented in schools across the United States. Go Student and Varsity Tutors were also good candidates because they offer tutoring services with a similar business model, meaning tutors are not required to be licensed teachers.

Some insight that our research provided was:

  • Click Learning offered rates that were very competitive compared to other providers in the market. Where other providers charged students $40-$50 per hour and paid their instructors $14-$17, Click Learning charged students $30 and paid $25 of that to their instructors. The benefit, in this case, was both to students, having to pay less, and instructors, getting more gross pay per hour and more percentage of what the students paid.

  • Click makes background checks for instructors mandatory, ensuring a safer learning environment for their students.

  • The duration of a session that could be booked at Click could be either 30 minutes or 60, allowing more flexibility for both students and instructors.

  • The core value that Click focuses on, the fact that they match tutors based on their personality and hobbies so as to provide a deeper connection between students and instructors.

Another category we defined for market research was companies that provided services for students and/or children, other than teaching, in an online environment, i.e their comparators. We selected Urban Sitter, ADP List, and Google Classroom for this research section.

We chose UrbanSitter and discovered candidates must pass a background check, similar to Click. ADP List and Google Classroom were good candidates because they have similar booking features and established users.

All the sites we researched for this comparative analysis had a feature for:

  • Messaging

  • A wallet to accept pay

  • A calendar, and

  • A 1 on 1 session

This allowed us to compare the sites designs and find growth opportunities for Click, which gave us insight to prepare for our user interviews, the next step in our research.

Planning for our interviews began with question preparation, for which our team brainstormed until we had settled on a set of questions that felt comprehensive and yet not excessively exhausting for our interviewees. We divided the questions into four major categories:

  1. Background in education

  2. Tech fluency

  3. 1 on 1 teaching experiences

  4. Motivation to get into the field of education