独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Smart People Need Smart Resources

This week I developed a product concept for a fictional company, Smart People Inc.

Smart People Inc. is an educational company offering in-person language courses, most popularly in their summer camp. The current business model offers a unique approach to learning, specializing in interactive methods to engage students — i.e. through sports and other activities. Additionally, Smart People tracks students progress, continually offers the attendees feedback, and allows students to select their activities to create an experience unique to their needs.

Sounds pretty great, right?

The current business model severely limits the potential audience. Additionally, the facility incurs many operational costs, therefore, resulting in steep tuition. The company would like to expand their audience by integrating an online learning platform. Their hope is that by doing so, they can provide users a flexible & cost affective alternative.

So how do you design an online platform for a company who’s principle value is interactive learning? Well, that’s what I aimed to uncover.

Naturally, I took to Google as my first step. Conducting secondary research is an essential starting point for any UX project to gain a decent scope of the issue at hand.

According to a study published in Forbes,

Simply knowing words and structures does not enable a learner; rather, it’s one’s ability to use them meaningfully that makes them valuable. People are more likely to retain knowledge when the context is of interest or relevant to their lives.

Before developing survey and interview questions, I found it was important to first understand who Smart People is up against. I completed a thorough analysis of the online language-learning market and plotted my findings in a feature comparison chart. This visual aid granted me the opportunity to clearly see what areas our competitors excel, understand the current industry standards, and pin point opportunities to introduce competitive new features to our product.

The feature comparison chart provided the necessary information to synthesize and define each competitor’s key strengths in a market positioning chart. This chart highlights the blue ocean — A blue ocean exists when there is potential for a competitive edge, as there is limited competition. If Smart People can develop a product to fall in-line with these parameters (assuming that these areas are in-line with the customers wants/needs), they would have an optimal and competitive product.

Now with a better grasp of the current market, I moved on to generate questions to gather quantitative and qualitative data from Smart People’s ideal target audience.

I acquired insights from 56 survey responses and the 5 interviews. I determined the majority of user’s pains, gains, and current habits by organizing the data in an affinity map. This tool served to visualize the common groupings of the received responses.

I found the following to be true regarding the vast majority of our users.

The data generated led to the creation of my user persona and user journey map. Developing the user persona and journey map served as a tools to understand the primary users mental models. Through completion of these exercises I was able to uncover Bored Ben’s primary pain points, understand the context of what/when he is experiencing struggles and highlight areas for opportunity.

Along the user’s journey, the pain points shifted. Cost was a deterrence as far as customer acquisition, however, motivation (or lack there of) was the main pain point for customer retention.

Bored Ben recently moved to Miami and wants to learn Spanish as he has found it necessary living here. He has tried several language apps, but he can’t seem to remain engaged beyond several days of use. Furthermore, the few lessons he has retained include very rudimentary vocabulary. Bored Ben is in need of an interactive solution to teach himself contextual Spanish.

I developed several How Might We questions that encompassed the primary user’s main pain points, then time-boxed myself to brainstorm as many solutions as possible. A mind map then helped me build upon each ideation.

I decided to focus on solving for the following:

How might we design a mobile app for young adults learning a new language that helps them remain engaged with the content while studying remotely?

Before selecting an ideation to develop, it was important to take a step back to look at the whole picture. This is where a value proposition came in handy. This canvas is a living document that aligns the customer needs with the business goals. As much as we would love to be the ultimate user defender by solving for every documented pain, we must make sure that our solutions remain in-line with the business goals and values. Keeping this in mind led me to select the most valuable solution.

Based on my research and analysis, I decided developing a mobile interactive language app that encourages users to interact with their community through gamification features will help those primary users to remain engaged while learning. Users would be able to earn points by completing real world challenges using the knowledge gained from completed lessons. Users would be required to record and upload their challenges. The points can later be cashed in to unlock additional app features.

Using the Moscow Method, I refined the initial iteration to reflect the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This impact vs effort chart serves to decipher which features will have the most impact for the user and the least effort for the business. Those MVP features are placed in the must-have quadrant

The user flow showcased the user’s happy path, or ideal path supposing no errors are incurred, to achieve the main scenario end goal.

The main use case is to complete an interactive challenge using the Smart People App. The user then selects and records a video challenge on a completed lesson. The user then submits the challenge. The user flow chart below helped me visualize the decisions the user would make during their experience, as well as giving me a map for the screens I need to prototype at first. This was a vital step to determine which screens were required to be wireframed.

I tested the product with 5 users to evaluate any issues they experienced along the MVP happy path.

This page alone received an 80% misclick rate and users spent 31 seconds on average attempting to complete the task.

One tester commented:

The quantitative data received from the generated heat maps and the qualitative data from the user’s feedback provided valuable insights on how to properly adjust the profile page to better suit their needs.

I then redeveloped the next iteration, fixing the heuristics to take the user’s incurred difficulties into account.

We will know the Smart People Mobile App is successful with high task completion rates, high customer retention, high ratings in the app store, and by maintaining a low churn rate. Furthermore, once the product has been to market long enough for us to conduct follow up research, we will know we are successful if user’s claim to have gained a larger foreign vocabulary or become fluent through use of the app.

I identified the main user pain point to be the lack of motivation and content engagement while learning a new language digitally. Although there were many user pain points that could have been addressed, I found engagement to be the most pressing issue as it directly affects user retention. The incorporation of more adaptive learning features will provide a more personalized and engaging user experience, leading to more user’s achieving their personal goals. This communicative, interactive approach to e-learning encompasses Smart People’s business values while also providing flexibility to the at home user.

The next step of the process would be to deliver the final prototype the end-user to measure whether or not my assumptions prove to be true. If so- I would then plan to implementing the next iteration of features from the “should-have” column of the Moscow chart. This would include a “hotspot” feature to meet up with nearby users to practice linguist skills. This would help to address users desire to learn conversational Spanish/English.

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

The Qocreate Proposal Process

Founded by Qocreate CEO Mike Huckleberry, the Story, System, Style proposal writing process goes against the grain of standard federal proposals and provides something you don’t see a lot of in the…

A stroll on the banks of the River Severn

With a free day and little inclination to drive any further afield than was necessary, I instead returned once more to my spiritual home of Ironbridge and home to the “Grand Old Lady” and oldest…

How to Quickly Discover New Leads Using RepIQ

Most salespeople deal with these struggles on a daily basis. In fact, on average, 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting! Here at RepIQ, we believe the best way to start prospecting…