Smart People Inc. | A UX Case Study

Ana Oliveira
Nov 1 · Unlisted

Can a summer camp go digital and still be as fun as the real thing ?

Smart People Inc.* is a company who already has a good track record of organizing summer camps to learn new languages such as English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and many more. They do 3 camps per season and each of their camps lasts for 4 weeks, offering a wide variety of fun activities — sports, games, humour, outdoor activities and so much more. These summer camps are aimed at a population aged between 12 and 21 years old.

But, no matter how popular Smart People Inc. summer camps have proven, there is still a large part of the target population that is left out, for cost or time reasons.

That is why Smart People Inc. wants to bring their knowledge, expertise and unique approach to language learning into the digital realm in order to reach as many persons as possible.

How to do so and still keep the experience as fun and engaging as a summer camp in real life ?

To find out, I teamed up with the amazing Océane R. and we applied our UX Design skills to devise a solution together, following the design thinking process — which means we had to empathize with our users, define who our main user was more precisely, ideate a solution, prototype and test it.

Empathize

First things first, we needed to narrow down our target, because between the ages of 12 and 21 years old kids change a lot and are not interested in the same thing.

So we decided to focus on teenagers aged between 18 and 21 years old.

Now we just needed to find out what could motivate them to study another language, what would it take for them to sign up on for a digital summer camp, how they wished languages were taught and how they hoped to practice.

So what did we find, you might wonder ?

Well we started by interviewing — in person — 6 potential users, aged between 18 and 21 years old, to know a little more about their past experiences, their expectations and their wishes regarding language learning.

All interviewees were quite disappointed with their past experiences in school, they felt that they didn’t get enough feedback from their teachers that needed to address so many students per class. They all felt the lack of practice that comes with traditional teachings and some also felt that traditional teaching was more focused on getting results for standardized tests rather than making sure that real knowledge was acquired.

Most of them believed that immersion was the best way to learn another language and that having the possibility to exchange with native speakers was a must.

Those insights were already very interesting, but we wanted to get a little deeper into the research process and opted to do a survey to get some measurable results on the subject.

Even though we didn’t get as much answers as we expected, some trends came out of the survey as you can see below.

The interviewees showed an unanimous interest in having access to teachings evolving around their own centres of interest like music, science, literature and so on.
The interviewees showed a great interest in the cultural aspect of learning a foreign language.
Having access to native speakers and the possibility to practice through chatting was another strong trend that came out of our survey.

The wish to acquire better skills in another language was a strong among all interviewees but traditional learning didn’t elicit the engaging experience they aspired to.

With all the data we gathered from this research phase, we are able to draw an empathy map to get a better picture of our typical user.

Define

We were finally getting a better picture of our user, enough to actually draw a user persona — which is the representation of a typical, it is not a real person but it could be.

Let me introduce you to Tom :

Tom, a 20 y/o student, wants an interactive, engaging and personalized experience while attending online Smart People Summer Camp because he wants to have fun while improving his English skills.

How might we help him achieve this ?

Ideate

Now that we knew who we were designing for, we could start ideating a solution according to our user needs and expectations.

We devised a mobile app that will provide participants with an online experience as close as possible to a live summer camp.

It offers many functionalities, most of them online.

With this app they will be able to learn or improve on a foreign language with interactive lessons, chat with native speakers and a personal coach, as well as engage in some fun activities either online or in real life.

How did we get there ?

Based on our research we looked for an answer to our persona’s dilemma and to do so we used a couple of creative techniques to get the most ideas out of our heads and choose the best ones to design a solution.

We started with crazy eights, a technique to get a lot of ideas in a short time : we had 8 minutes to write down/sketch any idea we could think of to find a solution to our persona’s needs, with the help of a timer we would have to go to the next idea every minute. That’s how you end up quickly with 8 ideas and the more you go, the crazier it gets, because you need to put something out and you don’t have the time to ponder on the fact if the idea is adequate or not. We each wrote our ideas on our own.

After the first round we shared our ideas with each other and decided to do a second a round to see what else we could think of. This first exercise helped us to get a better vision of what our app could look like. But we felt like playing a little more with ideas and did a round of worst idea.

Worst idea is about taking the reverse path to finding a solution, because you need to find the worst possible solution ever, what not to do in order to satisfy our user.

Now that we knew who we were designing for and had a good amount of ideas for features, we needed to take a moment to gather our thoughts and prioritize our features, to choose what had to do go on our first release, what could wait for a second a release and what was of no value.

In order to prioritize our features, we went with the MoSCOW method, it stands for : Must have, Should have, COuld have, Won’t have. So we wrote all our features and put them on a quadrant to see to which of these categories they belonged.

[INSERT PIC of MoSCOW board]

Prototype

We finally started sketching our first wireframes in order to create a low fidelity (low fi) prototype made out of paper to quickly test our solution with users from our age group and see what actually worked and what could be improved.

Here’s a peak at our low fi prototype.

[insert pics]

We dreamed an app divided in four main sections :

  • The profile page acted as the home page, showing Tom’s profile picture, a circular progress bar around it, the 5 themes he chose to learn about when he signed up, the links to the repositories of knowledge, fun facts and rewards he’s about to collect on his learning journey, as well as a link to the settings page where he can act upon his account settings as well as the app settings.
  • The learning section, organized in 4 weeks, each week in 5 themes that Tom can study in the order he prefers, the progression in difficulty is not organized in the week itself, but week after week, that’s why Tom cannot unlock the second week before he complete all the lessons of the first week and so on.
  • The activities are divided into two subsections : Quiz Time and Workshops. Quiz Time is divided in 5 themes — according to Tom preferences — and the quizzes are renewed every week, there is also a global ranking to see how he compares against his peers and how much points he gained, points will be transformed in rewards such as vouchers and discounts to cultural events close to his home. The workshops are also organized around 5 themes and can be done either in real life or online. A workshop can be a cine club session with movie + debate or a cooking masterclass starting with a visit to a local specialty deli shop and ending with a shared meals between all the masterclass participants, and each workshop with tied up the topics learned during the week. The workshops are animated by a network of local ambassadors in big cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Madrid, Barcelona, Milano, Roma, etc. But for those who are still too far from these big cities, a digital version will be provided so they don’t feel left out.

Test

what came out of the first test

second iteration on mid fi + notion of MVP

Tom has already created an account and is signed in on the app, it’s the first week of his Summer Camp.

It means that you have provided : a valid email address, your birthday, your country, the languages you speak fluently ; you have chosen 5 themes of interests among a list of ten, these themes will feed your English practice.

  • Learn a new topic
  • Chat with your coach
  • Chat with a new contact
  • Resume a conversation with another peer
  • Check the activities
  • Do a quiz
  • Book a workshop

MVP

Conclusion (next steps)

9. Conclusion

The impact (positive/negative) you design had on the user

Measurable performance indicators

10. Afterthought

The next steps

Take a step back

Share what you learned

*Smart People Inc. is a fictional company. We worked on this project as part of the UX|UI Design Bootcamp at Ironhack Paris.

Unlisted

Ana Oliveira

Written by

Junior UX|UI designer — Paris | Porto

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade