Improve Online Course Experience With Gamification -Skill Academy

Gamification mechanics is used
to motivate and trigger desired behaviours on learners. (Duy Huynh, 2016)

This is a follow up article. If you haven’t read the previous article, you can check it here.

If you are confused why we make two different research, It’s actually not. The first research is to find pain points in current application so we can make better version. Why? Because in the 2nd research we make many elements to be inserted in new version of application. So it’s better to use improved version since it’s actually two connected work in the end.

Goals

We defined goals to make the concept achievable and not expand too much.

Research Goals

1. Define the implementation and flow of desired gamification

2. Give unique branding for specific market of skill academy platform

UX Goals

1. Make fun and challenging route of gamification

2. User centrist route while also potentially profitable aspect for business

Target User

The target is professional /worker. Age around 20–35 years old, tech savvy. We create Budi as user persona from characteristic of our respondents.

User Persona

Gamification SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis of the gamification concept defined to identify important point can be done and need to be aware while implementing this feature.

• Strength: User feels more motivated to finish classes.
• Weakness: Only really motivated users will be really committed to finish classes.
• Opportunities: Variety and fun challenges that is periodically given to users can generate more enjoyable experience and increase engagement.
• Threats: User leaves app, feeling overwhelmed by challenges and/or exams.

Getting Started

Gamification has become a trend, concepting began by do some library research, see why and how it works by read some journal and case studies related gamification. We found some inspiring ideas from existing application such as Duolingo, Forest and Strava.

As many app learned, we choose two most suitable with our subject (more of indirect competitors actually): Ruangguru and Duolingo.

Comparative analysis

We found some insights as to what’s the important elements needed and not in our gamification. These insights really guided us in our inclusion of components.

• Points (Poin) as the principle of all activities in gamification, as the incremental addition of points will be used to levelling up.
• Challenge as a form of activity that needs to be completed.
• Reward as a prize of player’s achievement. We use the term Gold (koin) and Voucher (kupon).
• Interactive Element as a strategy to engage the user more, making them feel more appreciated and becoming a more loyal user.

As component defined, we built a concept model of our gamification, detailing when and how they get points, gold, access challenges, etc.

Gamification Flow

Information Architecture

By adding gamification, the flow of application changed quite significantly. We map all elements in the system as information architecture. The architecture is basically used as our foundations for the complete user flow.

Information Architecture

Poin and Koin

As part of most fundamental element, Poin and koin are different. Poin is incremental, can’t be decreased. It used to leveling up. Meanwhile koin is gold, or money in application. The purpose is to be spent inside application.

Voucher

Voucher or kupon is reward inside application. It can be used to many things, the concept is it’s can be used outside application. Since the business is educational, the voucher must be in line with educational purpose, so the voucher only can be used for bookstore, workshop and conference.

Challenge

Challenge divided as 3, daily,weekly, and others challenge. By finish challenge player can get koin and badge.

Introduce Our Mascot

Bejo

Remember Duo? Just like Duo in Duolingo, We have Bejo as our mascot. His purpose is to implement our interactive element strategy more effectively.

Bejo is a male otter. The name is abbreviation of “berang-berang jago” (Master Otter) which means luck in Javanese language.

Otter was chosen as a representative of animals with skill, since it can use tools (stone to open clam) and build dams. It makes him a suitable icon for the Skill Academy platform’s branding, while the fun aspect of Bejo hopefully can increase app retention.

Bejo Interactive Element

Storyboard

We made a visual storyboard to study how Budi will explore this feature and what circumstances he use in this app.

Storyboard by Arnold Rahardja

Prototype and Iteration

We did numerous brainstorming, then throw our first full prototype to users and our mentor Deni Dwi Arta to find we have two major issues that we need to address.

• User was confused what they need to do on the first time, so we gave clue to continue their last class or engage them o check the available challenge using hero slider

Landing Page

• User find difficulties where and how to buy voucher, it may caused by the profile panel not standout enough (using blue background). Since it is an important element we changed it into red and arrange better layout for profile and voucher page.

Profile Page

Final Prototype

For final prototype you can try all of our feature here

What Can Do Better

• Screening better respondent to get much better insight
• We could have obtained more data from quantitative research such as online survey.
• Explore more fun feature, like avatar, skin, etc (but needed more research actually)
• Designed the desktop site version of the application, seeing as there are a lot of people who use PC to access online learning sites.

Lesson Learned

This project give me understanding about how hard research be in limited sprint time. Meanwhile it needs strong discipline to committed with your plan and schedule, but the most suffer actually making things as dark theme :’). Thanks team for all of our hard work..