Educational app Smart People: UX case study
For our third project with Ironhack, we teamed up with Guillaume Heyraud to digitalize the experience of a summer camp for kids.
The camp story: Everyone is happy, they do surf and a kid is crying in the middle of summer because he misses his mommy. Smart People’s camp is kind of different: It is a learning camp where kids ally languages learning and fun activities. Our brief was to design a 100% mobile solution to offer a comparable experience. It had to be either cheap or free.
Smart People Inc. is an educational company born in 2014. They currently offer in-person language courses — English for Spanish speakers and Spanish for English speakers — for kids from 12 to 18 years old.
First we asked ourselves about teenagers and their use of smartphones: What do they expect of its use and how do they get what they want ? Fortunately, the internet is full of interesting articles on this subject. Through UX research we deepened understanding of the frustrations and needs ouf our users. We concluded that most of teens like to learn languages in a fun way and to discover new people from different cultures, if possible their age.
We took as a base the following journey of a teen discovering and using a competitors app to learn Spanish during summer.
Every problem is an opportunity to design
We decided to work on the red part. We stated the problem following HMW Design kit (IDEO): How might we help Emma to interact in a foreign language through an entertaining online experience ? In other words, we focused on funny and social features to maintain motivation at its maximum.
We proposed an app reproducing a camp timing — let’s say 21 days — and proposing interactive contents such as games, video lessons and quizzs to validate knowledge.
We made a very quick prototype using Sketch and we tested it with designers, Ironhack’s developers and of course “real” users: the 5 teenagers we interviewed at the beginning of our UX process. We implemented their insights into the second version of our prototype. Here is a quick overview of the “completing an activity” path, composed of a video lesson, a 1VS1 quizz and a chat feature:
This is of course the very beginning of a solution. Design thinking involves a lot of prototyping, because we constantly iterate to adjust our trajectory and to stick with our users and business needs/expectations. We did it using Sketch but also a lot of brainstorm techniques before the final drawing.
There is a lot of steps following this quick simulation, we will see it on a next project. Thanks for reading and share it with your kids ! Thanks Marcelina Díaz for your coaching and of course my partner Guillaume.
