PROJECT BACKGROUND
EF would like to let students have a more organized study plan on mobile applications to increase user stickiness and avoid loss of students. The business side didn’t have a clear plan on how to design a learning plan for the students and whether the learning plan can be successful, but they wanted us to launch this feature to verify as soon as possible. Due to the urgency of the project, I proposed to develop in phases to quickly meet the MVP requirements first, then conduct in-depth user research and design verification in the second phase to optimizing the product.
Process Overview
The project started with two phases. The first phase is to quickly meet business needs in a limited time, and the second phase is to provide a more comprehensive solution after user research and design verification. After that, the product will continue to iterate.
Phase 1 - Meet requirements
Although we cannot conduct a comprehensive user research due to limited time, we had a talk with student adviser on how the current study plan was created offline.
One challenge to transform this offline activity into an online activity is to make students understand what they are doing and how they can do it.
Students do not have a clear understanding of the meaning of different stages. This process is currently completed by the help of student advisors. Therefore we consulted with student advisors about the meaning of each stage to students (e.g. how many hours to study, how many lessons per week, skills they can learn), and not just let them choose the level. We want to enable student to complete this process by themselves to create a rational study plan.
The design will also provide students a clear preview of their progress, where students would be notified if they were ahead or behind the plan.
User Research
At the early stage when we discuss with the business side, we found that although it seemed that what business wanted was to develop the study plan feature to let students create study plan on their own, but the actual requirement should be how to motivate students to learn more actively.
So while the design of first phase was being developed, we went to several student centers and deliberately invited students in different levels and time they had been with EF to participate in the research and try to understand three main questions:
How do students currently set up and complete their study plan? (To validate our first phase design)
What are the major issues to stop them from completing the plan? (Pain points)
What helps students engage with study more actively? (Motivation)
Students were interviewed. To explore more about students’ thoughts and experiences, we tried to guide them by pre-set questions then dug into their answers. Then we asked them to went through the prototype of phase 1 design to validate if our design had solved their problems or partially helped them. We also interviewed some SCs (Student Consultants) who normally helped students set up study plans and tracked their progress. By interviewing SCs, we could utilize their experience to optimize our designs and considering the app could also potentially reduce SCs’ workload, their inputs are important as well.
Phase 2 - diving deep
Summarized the results of user research, we put our focus on following aspects:
Interaction with others. It was almost a common understanding among students that they come to center instead of studying at home because they felt they were studying with others and they liked it. Although Smart English app was designed to be a self-study app, we were trying to enable students interact with others as they study.
People are lazy so we need to give a push. “By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion”. From students and SCs, we knew the major reason that students stop studying was laziness. By all means, we need to help them overcome this weakness.
Encourage rather than punishment. By punishment, we may force people to study, but it certainly lowers the efficiency and may eventually fail. Therefore we spent more time brainstorming on how to encourage and reward students.
Breakdown the goal of study. One of the issues we found was the ultimate goal was set towards the end of students’ study. As the time passes, students might lose their enthusiasm to complete the goal. We wanted to help students breakdown the goal into months or even weeks.
Monthly Report
Learning from many other apps, we created a Monthly Study Report to summarize the progress of the month for each student.
We designed 4 scenarios with different copies in order to encourage everyone in a different way. Even for one who had done nothing, we turned the tone to be more humorous and tried to cheer students up.
In addition, with monthly report, students can be notified and track their progress on a monthly basis to avoid falling behind too much to catch up.
Share Achievements
We designed several scenarios that allow student to share their progress, achievements, skills with others on social media. Interaction with other users brings numerous advantages for experience and business.
People like to show off especially their achievements. We could fulfill their self-satisfaction and also build brand recognitions as it spreads on social media.
The achievements were designed to be shared as a picture in phase 2. Later we planned to transform it into a more interactive form to be shared.
Target Breakdown & Stimulation
Not only monthly checkup, we even went further for a weekly checkup. We evenly split online lessons and offline classes into each week but also allowed users to adjust their target every week while remain monthly target unchanged.
If user hasn’t finished their tasks, we also send notifications to remind them.
Hence we could stimulate students at least on a weekly basis.
Customized Recommendations
To push students to study, we also designed a place to recommend students what to do next. It checks students’ progress and completed tasks and directs students to the next task which fits students’ progress.
Engagement
Students could opt to join study group to study together and compete with each other. The competition focus more on meaningful achievements instead of time-consuming achievements.
I wanted to adopt gamification philosophy in the app to make studying more interesting therefore increase students' engagement. One of the idea was to reward users with badges when they achieve something.
Final Thoughts
It is normal that designers have to complete a project within a short time and there was no time to complete any sort of user research or analysis. But better late than never, many projects are agile and we have chances to iterate the design. We’ll eventually find time to do the research and testing and there are always rewards for designers to do it. Additionally, it is always a good choice to spend some times on secondary users, in this project, the SCs, they will also provide valuable information and fresh thoughts from another angle to help designers solve problems.