BYJU’S Classes Neo
In the wake of the pandemic, the conventional methods of schooling and tutoring took a big hit with the lockdowns, which led to a significant and unanticipated transformation in the EdTech industry.
One of the company's pilot projects BYJU’S Classes gained great traction towards the beginning of the pandemic. It was already providing students with Recorded Classes in which they can interact and ask doubts in real time through Chat.
With the panademic prolonging, the need for online classes with personal connect and better doubt resolution has grown big and that’s where we started with BYJU’S Classes Neo version.
We started the whole thing with a three-member design team; Richu, Parul, and myself. In a mix of emotions ranging from excitement, nervousness, and pressure to perform, we buckled up for the challenge that lay ahead of us.
We were dealing with a generation of children who had grown up primarily with offline learning. Their social ties would now have to move completely to a virtual platform on short notice. The existing tools like Zoom or Meet merely facilitate online meetings and do not focus on online learning, especially for these age groups. Plus, the emotional connection between two primary users (Students and Teachers) remained a great challenge.
Our focus was on presenting an experience that feels organic and adds elements of socialising and communication.
Following multiple meetings with stakeholders, we identified four areas for enhancing the user experience as our immediate focus:
- Encouraging live interaction between tutor and student
- Providing personalised attention to students
- Clarifying doubts in real-time
- Enabling better Student-Tutor connection
Discovery phase
We didn’t have the luxury of going with the typical discovery phase to collect information. Our users(kids) are also new to this space. We relied on secondary research going through Twitter threads, news articles by teachers on how they are dealing with teaching and innovative methods in teaching.
Empathising with users is the best part for us, all team members went nostalgic in thinking about experiences we had in our school times. Everyone was have different personalities that gave us an understanding of different perspectives in way of learning.
Here is a short compilation of our initial insights here. Thanks to my teammate Parul for compiling into a blog
Final Designs
I will jump into the final designs and explain parallelly instead of boring you with more content.
Pre-class Corridor
Remember in our school time, before class we chit-chat and have all informal discussions, play games etc in school corridors. We want our users also to have a similar experience. With all online classes happening, students are emotionally stressed out. We want them to have some refreshments before the start of the class. This is technically called preclass experience which starts 10min before class time. Here students can play games, watch fun videos, discuss stuff, have their own profiles etc. This will help students to understand each other increase connection between and feel part of the community which they are missing.
Tutor-Student Connect
Once the class time started, we designed an experience to have a little conversation between the tutor and students on video and audio. Like how we wish in school “Good Morning teacher” “How are you students” etc. This initial 2–5min is expected to have this tutor-students space. Chat can be a way for communication but getting on video and audio for conversation feels more empathetic.
In class Teaching Experience
We wanted students to retain the offline class experience by creating a where it feels like they are listening to class with other students as well. Added reactions to increase engagement. Chat, and hand raise functionalities are retained. There will be cases where the teacher doesn’t want any disturbances or deviations. Hence, we gave our tutors a tool called focus mode which will disable mic, chat, and video tiles of other students and students can only see the content that is being taught.
There are many other parts of class like a whiteboard and quizzes in between classes that increase engagement in class
Future of Product
During our initial ideation, we figured out many things this product should tackle or offer solutions to. We clubbed them into these buckets which we would like to work in future
- Digital Well-Being of students
- Increase Confidence in Kids
- Inculcate a Sense of Responsibility
- School Experience/ Social side of things
- Gamification
- Personalisation
