How to handle multiple prospective users of an account?

Question

Here is the situation. We have a website that is for a program that helps high school juniors and seniors, write their college app. The problem we are having is how to handle the user accounts. Should the account be associated with the parent, or the student.

It makes sense for the account to be a parent account because they are the ones paying for the program. But our target audience are high schoolers. So they would be the ones making their own schedules, as well as communicating with their teachers.

One idea was to have some kind of sub-accounts under a main account. But that seems a bit kludgey. You would need someway for either students to sign up and then associate themselves with their parent, but that becomes a problem. How would that be communicated. An alternative would be to have parents create accounts for the child, but that also seems a bit annoying.

Any ideas?

Update:

The "features" that I thought each group would need to be able to handle:

Parent

• Ability to pay for programs
• Ability to see student's essay, but not edit it
• Be able to communicate with student's teacher
• Ability to register for programs

Student

• Communicate with their teachers
• Collaborate in real time with their teachers on essay material
• Schedule meetings with their teacher
• Not be able to view siblings materials

Answer 1

There are two concepts floating around in your question that you are asking, and the problems come about because you are imagining real people having to reconcile them:

• User
• Account

I'd suggest removing the word "Account" entirely. Perhaps under the covers in your system there is still something called "Account", but you can successfully solve this by removing this term from the point of view of users.

So now we are left with one concept:

• User

The User may be a parent, or may be a student. Either way, it's a straightforward and well known thing to create a login and access a system as a user.

Next, the User creates a new college application. From the point of view of the user, this would be the same process whether it's the parent or the student. All we are doing is creating a new college application. When they create this application, they can enter the student's name, and that name may not match the users' name.

Once the new college application is created, only the person who created it can access it until she invites someone else. This can mimic how Google Documents or other collaboration tools work, basically the call to action would be "Invite others" and then simply prompt for email addresses. If it's relevant, you could prompt for relationship at this point, but if there is a way to avoid having to label any user as parent/student and make it all about users and college applications, it would be a simpler experience.

So my suggestion here is to remove the burden of self- or other-identification entirely if it's possible to do so and still provide the help and value that you are setting out to give.

Answer 2

I think your focus should be the student. After all, that's who the parent is focused on, regardless of whose name is on the check.

Then, on your sign up/log in forms, you could say "Student's Name" instead of "username" or whatever.

Answer 3

Based on your situation, I think you should develop the app/website in such a way that both parents and children can have user accounts but parents can have full access whereas their children can have "view only" access.

Using this approach parents can keep track of their dedicated account and at the same time children can view or get notifications about some events just by browsing various sections of the app/website.

Hope this might answered your question.