In my previous blog, I briefly covered my internship project, but here I will be talking about the different aspects of the project in detail. So let’s get started! [You can scroll down to the end for a brief summary.]
My internship project was around creating gamified experiences to increase engagement among students and create a sense of belonging and a bond among them. This would help make the learning experience more fun and wholesome for the students. The timeline for the project was from January 2022 to June 2022. I had the great chance to create my timeline and road map, along with multiple milestone presentations, both internally and with the project managers (PMs) on a regular basis, so I could get feedback and keep making the project better.
For this project, I got to wear multiple hats and worked on primary research, secondary research, ideation, user flows, wireframing, UI design, and prototyping. I was also mentored by Pragya Singh, the lead product designer, and got an awesome chance to collaborate with some designers and my fellow interns.
Before I begin talking about and explaining the project’s concept, it is necessary to establish the platform’s basic context — BYJU’S Classes.
BYJU’S Classes is the live class product offered by BYJU’S Learning app. This involves a tutor teaching in class, solving doubts, and organising in-class pop-up quizzes; there is also a master tutor who teaches via video.
After I learned about and used the platform for a while, I decided to talk to different stakeholders to find out where the gaps were and look at the projects the team had already worked on to get students more involved.
Post this tedious but interesting process, I came down to framing a problem statement:
“making the classes more engaging and personalising the journey right from enrollment until the first two weeks of classes for the multiple stakeholders involved in the system.”
After framing this problem statement, I started to understand what additional data points and evidence I needed to make the initial experience more fun for the students and understand their behaviour during online schooling.
Some of the key insights that resulted from this study are as follows:
- Difficulty in making friends with students who have not met each other in person
- Students feel most comfortable asking questions about their classes to their parents, friends, or familiar teachers. Parents were the first preference since the students are most comfortable with them.
- There are very few motivational factors that push students to attend class. Attendance marks were the top motivator.
- Students want to learn from people they look up to or who inspire them. Their favourite teacher, their parents, or a tech public figure like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were a few people the students had mentioned.
After collecting insights from the research studies, research papers, and journals, I started the ideation process.
Before starting the brainstorming sessions, I detailed out the current flows and default schedules students from different grades follow, what devices they use, how batches are allocated to students, etc. This step helped us look at the whole process at a microscope level.
Initially, we focused on brainstorming and exploring various directions we could take to personalise the whole onboarding and class experience for the first 2 weeks of classes. After multiple rounds of discussions with various stakeholders, we decided to go ahead with 2 directions: the first was developing connections between the students and tutors, and the second was developing connections between the students in a batch.
After narrowing it down to two directions, we started by building how-might-we-question sets, which helped us look at the problem statement from a different perspective and ask questions to find possible solutions. After framing around 5–6 questions about how we might proceed, we decided to narrow it down to just 2, and they are as follows:
- How might we help in building and fostering a student-tutor relationship?
- How might we help students make a connection with their classmates?
We mapped out the journey of a student right from the point the sales associate pitches the product until the first class to understand the possible opportunities where we could add a touch of personalization to make the journey more fun. We also included how multiple stakeholders in the system interacted with each other throughout the process. We tried to identify the possible reality and the expectation at each milestone that the user has to go through.
This helped us identify points for possible design interventions that could help make the student onboarding experience more fun, exciting, and engaging.
Later, we mapped out the ideal journey with 5 major milestones and the stakeholders involved at each milestone. We identified the pain points at each milestone and what we are trying to solve through design using “how might we” statements.
Using the objectives from the previous exercise, we further picked2 how might we statements and started ideations on it. The how might we statements we picked are as follows:
- How might we make the students more excited and confident to join the first class after 3 days?
- How can we initiate and strengthen relationships between students and tutors?
After multiple rounds of brainstorming, ideating, and improvising possible solutions, we came down to 4–5 possible solutions. The tools we used to select these solutions were the prioritisation matrix and using innovation and tech feasibility with the current stack.
After this long but fruitful process, we decided to go with the student profile system.
The profile system [pre-class] is a detailed profile page with information that students would like to know before beginning or attending classes. This could be used to help students get to know each other based on their shared interests, which would be helpful for any future interactions between students.
When students are waiting to join a class, their profiles will be visible on the pre-class waiting screen. It would assist students in exploring and getting to know one another before the class begins. It might also encourage students to arrive early for class. They can keep their profile alive and interesting by adding weekly or monthly activities, keeping track of them, and putting them on their profile.
Having a pop-up after the FTUE walkthrough or a prompt to remind students to create their profile and complete the process Providing students with a brief overview of the profile system and explaining how it will help them connect with other students.
After multiple iterations of the flow through user testing using wireframes, we decided on the flow [img attached above] which broke the whole system into smaller tasks and chunks and nudged the users at certain intervals. this helps to reduce the cognitive load of the users and complete the smaller tasks to get the satisfaction of completing the task. We also ask them weekly questions to keep the profile dynamic and alive.
Once the initial flow was finalised, we started building the intricate wireframes with different variations along with variations of the copy. This initial start helped us set a basic tone for the whole system, and how would this later help us in setting the basic UI and visual design for the whole design?
After building wireframes for all the possible use cases and edge cases, I started designing the UI for the system. I got to collaborate on this with a fellow intern who worked on building the design system for the platform. I was introduced to design systems a few years ago but was intrigued by how they are built from scratch, so this was an amazing opportunity to learn that. I also created a few elements that were very specific to the platform, so this also put my visual and UI design skills to the test. This helped me identify the gaps I had, and now I am trying to fill those gaps and upskill myself.
We had an awesome chance to validate the system flow and the wireframes and later the UI designs. This helps to improviase and iterate the flows and wireframes quickly which helped us to create a better solution for the users.
Task: Complete your profile [Usability Testing]
Sample size: 4 | Maximum time to complete the task: 3.5m. | Tools used: Zoom, Maze
- Users were a bit confused about where to click on the screen. e.g., one of the users tapped out and asked how to search for their location or couldn’t find the location.
- All of the participants were engaged, and interested, took their time, and finished the task.
- The users were eager to explore other profiles during the pre-class screen and tried tapping to check their profiles.
- Some users were also interested in adding more than two social media links.
To conclude, humans, being social animals, crave human interactions, be they physical or digital. The COVID-19-induced pandemic has further made it evident why human interaction and connection are important for our overall well-being.
Building and nurturing these social connections would not only help to solve one problem but would also help to make the in-class experience more fun and engaging, as well as motivate tutors to perform and teach better.
Using this data-driven and human-focused approach, the scope and possibilities are endless. This system would lay the foundation for other features that would be introduced further and enhance any future project that focuses on student-to-student interaction or tutor-to-student interaction.
TL;DR: My internship project aims to nurture connections and healthy interactions between students and tutors at BYJU’s classes in a fun and exciting manner. The profile system is a detailed profile page with information students would like to know about each other before beginning or attending classes. Pre-class is a detailed profile page with information students would like to know about each other. This could be used to form an initial connection among students based on common interests. Building and maintaining these social connections will not only make the class more fun and interesting, but will also set the stage for other activities that require students to talk to each other.
Check out the project deck here!
If you would like to know and understand more about the project you can check it out on anaghaa.com or please feel free to contact me at anaghaadesigns@gmail.com :)
If you’d like to connect, feel free to add me on Linkedin.
