Project: Tutora
This is a rare opportunity for me to showcase some of my work that isn’t shrouded by an NDA.
Starting life as an idea roughed out in an email, I was tasked with planning, branding, designing and developing what would become Tutorful (formerly Tutora). Roughly a year later, they’ve been live just over a month.
What is it?
I’d like to learn how to play the piano. You might need an English teacher for your under/over acheiving child. Trawling through the classifieds (or even Google) looking for a nearby rockin’ tutor sucks. Tutorful makes it soooooo easy.
Search
Students can search tutor profiles that have been vetted by Tutorful and are now ‘live’. You can search by subject (Maths) and location (Leopold Square, Sheffield).
We quickly find tutors that teach your chosen subject and are nearby. The ‘Best Match’ algorithm takes into consideriation, amongst other things and in no particular order, the quality of the tutor and their profile, how active they are and their reviews.
For seo reasons, we use the users query to perform the search and display a natural language(ish) version for the headings and url.
There are two main criteria that form the basis for all searches: distance and subjects.
Tutors are searched by distance from the query quickly and accurately. Taking into account the cuvature of the Earth, it’s accurate to a few centimeters.
Subjects are searched recursively from parent nodes, down. For example, searching “English” would return “English” and every one of it’s children: “English (GCSE)”, “English (A-Level)”, “English Literature”, etc.
Not bad for a bit of math and MySQL.
Profiles
Tutors create profiles on which they: write a biography/about me, set an hourly rate, upload a profile picture, list the subjects they teach, list the qualifications they have and privately tell us exactly where they’re based.
On page editing is the bomb.
Messaging
A student gets the ball rolling by messaging a tutor. They talk on the sites messaging system to agree on a date, time, duration, etc.
Booking
When the time comes, the tutor can book a lesson in for the student. Students and tutors can see their past and upcoming lessons on their respective dashboards, prices are automatically calculated based on the tutors rate and bookings can be set to repeat every week on the same day/time.
Both tutors and students can see their upcoming lessons on their dashboard, and, reminders are emailed out just before each lesson.
Payments
All payments are handled by the site. We automatically take payments from the students shortly after the lesson takes place and pay the tutor their earnings on a weekly basis.
Tutorful takes a small cut.
Final words
Tutorful was huge fun to work on. I’m proud of it.