Smart People Inc. app

Smart People Inc. is an educational company born in 2014. They currently offer in-person language courses — English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and many more — for kids and teenagers from 12 to 21 years old.

Their main attraction is a summer camp. Hundreds of teenagers join every year in different locations, as they have a very special recipe: they integrate sports, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching a second language.

• Currently, they do three four-week camps each summer
• A course has around 20 activities and 20 lessons
• Out of these activities and lessons, students get to decide which 10 they want to take
• If they are willing to join more sessions, they can either be put in the waiting list or ask to volunteer
• All attendees receive feedback from other students and their coaches
• Coaches follow student progress, in order to effectively asses them and be able to co-create the most adequate learning path together
• Smart People Inc. has a lot of material in the various formats already developed after years of running the camp and school

Problem

Smart People Inc. is finding many students are unable to attend the summer camp due to cost and time reasons, but still want to access the curriculum. Smart People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.

Team work

In this project, we were a team of two UX designers. UX design is the process of manipulating user behavior through usability, accessibility, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product or an app.
In order to organize our work together and to have a global vision on what we have to do, we created a Trello with “to do” / “on going” / “finished” tasks.
We also organized our week by using a UX Strategy calendar in order to know exactly our “goals of day” and to do not forgot anything.
The last tool we used in order to organize our work is the “Morning Stand up”, every morning, each member of the group tell the others about what he did the day before, his issues, problems and what he plans to do today. This method helps to know if goals of the day are checked or if there is any issue in the project.

Research

No project can start without collecting any datas and empathize with users.

Job To Be Done Interviews

That’s why we started to meet people who we are going to design for and know about their habits, insights and frustrations, by doing some “Job To Be Done Interviews”.

JTBD is a framework used to find opportunities to improve a product or create a new one. When you start to talk to consumers, you want to find that struggling moment, the moment where they say “I couldn’t do that”. It’s the moment they start to look for something new.

We interviewed 5 persons from 18 to 21 yo. We choose to focus on this age range because it was easier for us to find them. Interviews lasted around 10 to 15 minutes each. We didn’t prepared interview guide but adapted our questions to the conversation in order to have the most specific answers as possible. From these interviews, we identified that :

• 18 to 21 yo people need an app available at any moment of day and night because they like to use that kind of app as soon as they have time (during transportation, during the night, during meal, etc.)
• They like learnings apps but they are always disappointed. They aren’t enough playful, assessment methods doesn’t federate them in long term because there is no “student follow-up”
• They want a method to meet and talk with “real persons” in order to improve their conversations and pronunciation
• Teenagers and young adults spend lot of time in watching TV shows and they really like it. They think it could be a good way to improve their language.

These interviews really helped us to identify users frustrations and to understand their motivations for using e-learning apps and learning a language.

Quantitative survey

Interviews are not enough because they do not reflect a majority. So we used an online survey to collect more datas about our users. The survey is a good way to collect many datas in a minimal time and easily. We made this survey on Typeform to make it enjoyable for our users, indeed, this target is very hard to catch and they have an image culture, so a “nice looking” survey is very helpful.

We made a brainstorming together to ask the most important questions and to focus on what we really needed.

1. What are you doing during summer ?
2. Do you want to learn a new language or to perform one ?
3. How do you feel about using e-learning app ?
4. When are you using that kind of app ?
5. What would you expect from a language learning app?

With these datas, we were able to know that many people are interested by learning a new language (90%), that they like learning on app and even more if it’s complementary to a irl activities and also that they expect a very playful method to learn.
But the most important is that they really expect a feedback, not just wrong or true correction but a personalized one.

Market research

No research is complete without looking at the market and the competitors. We had a look on many learning apps (languages and more) to understand what they do well, what they missed and where they are positioned in the market.
What we have learned from it is that it’s hard to find an app with a real follow-up of the students. They are mostly either a follow-up app or a playful one.

We identified that people need both to be very engaged on the app and to play on it. There is also almost no app which provide a “social” feature or the possibility to meet other people and to interact with them. That was our starting point to start define process.

Define

After downloading our data and analyzing them by using tools such as empathy map and user journey, we really needed to define our persona and his user journey to be able to create the best solution as possible !

Persona and User Journey

Persona

User Journey

At this stage, we were able to identify the two most important pain points in which we wanted to orientate our solution. We asked ourselves the following questions :

• How Might We provide to Thomas an app where he can learn a language playfully
• How Might We provide to Thomas an app that he won’t fade of
• How Might We encourage Thomas to use the app till he feel comfortable with the new language

Problem Statement

We asked ourselves how can we mix all those questions and we tried to get the problem we wanted to solve out of it.

Thomas, the lazy senior high learner, needs a way to learn a language by mixing social activities and exercises because currently he struggles to find motivation and an engaging app.

Ideate

Round 1

The problem statement we had identify leads us to start our ideation step. We were sure about the issue we wanted to solve, so to create lots of ideas we used the “worse idea tool”.

When you can’t think of any more good ideas, have your team create a list of bad, stupid or illegal ideas to come up with fresh, good ideas.

During the ideation process, we came with several features here’s some examples : create a user profile / provide feedbacks (videos and textual) / create funny lessons to learn language / make some learning games / make the app available off-line / a level and xp system / etc.

We had too many features to add to our app and not enough time to develop and test them all, so at this step we took time to organize our ideas with MOSCOW Method.

“Must have” Vital / “Should have” Important / “Could have” Nice to have / “Won’t have” Out of scope

We started to focus on the “must have” features in our first version of the solution.

At first we created an app which provide to Thomas the opportunity to learn a language playfully and with a real follow-up from teachers. We made our lo-fi wireframe and we realized that we were missing one of our most important feature : “the social and meeting feature”. Indeed, Smart People Inc. organize summer camp and they want to provide to students a complete experience.

Round 2

Nothing is impossible. Even if we were a bit confused and lost when we realized that we weren’t answering to the problem, we made a second ideation round about this “social / meeting” feature. We came up with the idea to add an “event” feature.

Final round

Feature 1 : create a profile
Feature 2 : access to lessons and playful exercises
Feature 3 : videos feedbacks from teachers
Feature 4 : students can organize events about an activity to speak between each others and share some moments

Solution

With this solution Thomas has the opportunity to learn a language playfully and with a real follow-up from teachers and also to participate to various activities with his peers.

Feature 1 : create a profile

Thomas is able to create his profile, choose the language he wants to learn and to improve and his level in this language.

Feature 1

Feature 2 : learning platform

After creating his profile, Thomas has access to his training courses. For the first version of the app the only topic will be TV show because we identified that it’s one of the most common interest for this age range.
Here, Thomas can find the ongoing training path. Each path is composed of 6 units and there is in each unit one lesson and two exercises.
Exercise 1 : Thomas has to watch an extract from a TV show in VO, as many times as he needs and then he has to record himself by doubling the actors. The goal of this exercise is to help users with pronunciations.
Exercise 2 : Thomas will be challenging himself by making a duel with another students. They will have to answer to questions on different topics (vocabulary, comprehension, etc.). We didn’t create all the game screen, (it’s the same functioning as Duel Quizz) because it wasn’t the purpose of our test.

Features 2 and 3

Feature 3 : feedbacks from teachers

Thomas will have personalized feedback from a teacher at the end of each path. The teacher will make a video recorded with his correction and advices to help Thomas improving his capacities for next week. A summary is here to have a quick look on good and bad points.

Feature 4 : events

As a Smart People Inc. student, Thomas can create or participate to events linked to the language he is learning or linked to activities (TV shows at first). The goals of these events is to make Thomas and his peers meeting and speaking together (for example, in ours wireframes, Thomas is interested by a “Soirée Stranger Things S02 at a student home”). For a question of security, we decided to add a “rating” feature between students. Just like in Airbnb or Blablacar, rating help you for being comfortable with the person you are going to meet. So after participating to an event, Thomas is going to rate his “host”.

Mid-Fi Wireframes

You can find below, the wire-flow Thomas is going to follow to accomplish his tasks.

Tests and feedbacks

Because Thomas is only a persona and we can’t make him test our app ;), we found 5 persons to test it.
We chose to do our tests remotely with some 18 to 21 yo people because it was easier to reach them during the afternoon.
From these usability tests, we had lots of very different insights and we chose to focus on 5 of them, the ones we identified as the “most relevant” and the ones that came back several times.

• Some of our interviewees told us that they don’t really understand at first all the things they can do on the app. So we want to test a new feature : add some explicative screens at the first connexion on the app even before create an account. Like 5 screens where we will explain all the features you can find on the app and our method of learning.
• An interviewee pointed out to us that you can’t find the same features on the “home” and on the “burger menu” so we want to improve consistency in navigation by adding feedbacks on home page and e-learning platform access on the burger.
• Interviewees also commented on informations we put on the events cards. We are going to test to remove “I’m participating” and “I’m not participating” in the events list, in order to make the reading easier. Then, they also pointed out to us that the number of remaining places is very interesting to create the desire. To complete this page, some interviewees also told us that adding some tags about the event topic could be very interesting to choose the best event. We are going to test all these news stuffs in our next iteration, to make the reading quicker and easier.
• Interviewees also pointed out that a rate is not necessary meaningful without comments. So for our next iteration, we want to add the opportunity to reviews events and people more precisely by adding some comments.
• The last feedback we want to improve for the next iteration is the possibility to have an overall view on training paths. Indeed, some of our interviewees were a bit frustrated to not being able to see their progress and all the paths they already did. So we are going to ideate on a new page with all the paths you did and also all the one which are still unlock, so users will be able to follow their growth on the app.

You can find here the first interactive prototype of our app :).

Thank you for reading my post. Feel free to comment and to “clap” if you liked it :)

To be continued….