Smart People Case Study

France A
France A
Nov 1 · 11 min read

How to create an engaging 100% digital learning experience.

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.

However, they’re finding many students are unable to attend the summer camp due to cost and time reasons, but still want to access the curriculum.

The challenge.

This project is about creating an online learning platform for 12–21-year-old students that will transform the in-person learning experience into a 100% digital experience that can be accessed by students at a lower cost.

Meet language development standards through a new interactive way of learning, integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening domains.

For this project, as there are difference age groups (12–14; 15–17; 18–21) in the above age range, we decided to focus on 15 to 17 years old students.

How can we help Smart People Inc. to find a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.

My role in the project

As a UX designer I have been involved in various phases:

  • the research phase (about the users and about the current competition)
  • the analysis phase (about gathering and mapping collected data, and analyzing it)
  • the solution finding phase (through iterations, using many tools and technique that I’ll talk about later in this article)
  • the prototype phase (this includes also the testing of the proposed designs)

I was part of a team of 2. As the team was quite small, we found ourselves being involved in all phases of the project, and sharing all tasks. I imagine that if we had been more people in the team, we could have properly separate the tasks and competencies, but during this project, the T Shape Skill concept really took on its full meaning has each of us had to understand and be able to do everything.

The actual research and results

We started the research phase by a meeting to define how we would collect data, which tools and techniques we would need and use.

They can the collecting data phase we did through 6 Guerrilla style interviews we conducted in the street. Finding users wasn’t so hard. As a reminder, our targeted users were teenagers aged from 15 to 18 years. The research interviews were conducted during school holidays, most of our audience was enjoying the time off out in the street.

If the period had been different, we would probably have contacted some high schools nearby to ask them if we could interview some of their students.

But lucky us, the streets and squares were crawling with teens hanging out and enjoying the sun.

The environment made it easy to find interviewees, however with the ambiant noise it was not optimal to talk and record.

Surprisingly, all the people we asked agreed to be interviewed. At first most of them feel shy or maybe not at easy when they hear the word « interview ». This feeling soon disappeared once we better explain de context and how the interview would be conducted. Here we really realized the importance of arriving prepared and using the write words to describe what we do and the project.

We also realized the importance of conducting interviews as a team, one person asking the questions the other on recording and taking notes.

As the interview went, the interviewees felt more and more at ease and started doing more than giving short specific answer, they started speaking their mind and giving us really good insights that would soon lead us to our solution.

It’s amazing the amount of precious information one can give when they feel at ease, when they feel listened to. Here, open question are really useful as we show the interviewee we are really interested in what they have to say.

Once the interviewed were done, we gathered the insight and try to map them into different categories using the so called affinity map.

This helped us prepare questions for the survey. Each of us thought about questions with the first insights gathered, then we chose the best questions and merge them to end up with only 10 and launched the survey.

It’s quite challenging to get enough responses so that the results are valid. As we had only 1 week to submit our first MVP proposal, we unfortunately did not manage to gather enough answers (only 21).

Still, we started to see a pattern that would confirm the interviews insights.

We will not display nor use the results in this case study.

The insights

During the interviews we covered 4 main axis: the best ways to learn a new language, according to our target users; the reasons that motivate them to learn a new language; the reasons for dropping the lessons when using a learning app; finally, what type of features could motivate them to use a learning app.

Best ways to learn a new language:

  • Traveling abroad for at least 1 month.
  • Being completely immersed in another country.
  • Lessons with a teacher.
  • Introduce speaking earlier in the learning process (learn to speak before learning to write).
  • With TV shows and movies, first with french subtitles, then english ones, then none.

Reasons for learning another language:

  • Because they have to, for example: English is the universal language and they have to study it at school.
  • They like to learn new languages and feels comfortable with speaking other languages.
  • They have foreign relatives and/or friends.
  • They have a goal or project, they have to study another language for it to be successful: work abroad or plan to travel to another country.

Reasons for dropping apps lessons:

  • The app is boring app: redundant lessons, always the same type of exercises.
  • There usually is little to no feature or exercises to practice, it’s mostly written exercises.
  • There is no obligation so it’s difficult to be consistent especially when learning on your own.

Motivations to use language learning app:

  • Prize to win once the user’s reached a milestone. Prizes can be a trip or some free lessons for example.
  • Receive a certificate at the end of the course.
  • Competition: with other users of the app, from the same region/country or from other countries.
  • Feature to speak the language with a teacher through the phone.
  • Activities like guided tour for foreign tourists that would be led by learners.
  • Like a dating site: organise meetings with foreigners and discussion in the foreign language.
  • Frequent milestones or recap of what was covered during the lessons, or the level the user has reached, to give the users the feeling that they are progessing.
  • Learn in group, with friends.

Half of them did not know about existing bootcamps, and the other half found it expensive and would be interested in a more affordable alternative.

In the end, the human and speaking aspects mattered a lot. In every interviews, we receive this feedback that it’s important to practice orally, to speak to someone else, may it be a teacher or another user/learner.

So we decided to propose a digital experience that is centered around the user and their need to speak more than to write or read.

Our AHA moment

The most surprising thing was probably the fact that user really value the interaction with humans, the possibility to practice orally, even before doing exercises lesson, they were really talking about a shift in the way they are taught languages, they’d rather learn how to speak and then how to read write.

Other very interesting insight I did not expect to hear was the competition or reward thing. Some of the interviewees express this idea of having competition with other user and prizes to win to motivate them be consistent.

Indeed we often see all kind of app that offer you to gain point but you can usually do nothing tangible with those.

What they want is a real, concrete reward.

Now we have analyzed our data we can establish our persona and our user journey.

The problem statement

We have observed that Marco, a high-school student from Paris suburb area, who needs to find a way to improve his English and Spanish speaking skills, feels frustrated because classic learning methods at school focus on reading and writing while he prefers oral methods such as listening to music and watching movies in their original version.

Our online learning platform was designed to help high-school students like Marco to improve their language skills. As physical schools, most language learning apps don’t help users improve speaking skills, which is causing them to feel demotivated and drop the app learning.

How might we create an engaging language learning experience to help Marco improve his speaking skills and successfully pass his future tests/exams?

The proposed solution

The first version of the proposed product will have the most valuable features that we think answer the need to speak and practice more often.

This solutions will allow the user to do exercises and will be proposed activities that match with their interests.

Each chapter will included a lesson (mostly video format), with few text, then a quick exercises and finally the user will be able to choose among several offline activities such as meetups with other users to practice the language or activities based on the user’s interests (eg. Sports games where you only speak the learnt language, or tourist tours guided by the learners).

Basically, the app will feature:

  • The lesson menu where the user can see lessons, exercises and activities and meetups.
  • A profile page, where user will fill in their interests and topics they want to talk about. On this page they will also have access to the tailored learning program, to the schedule (that the user can customize) and to their level progression.
  • A chat option to discuss and share tips with other users learning the same languages as the user. Ultimately group work will be possible but this is not part of the first features that will be developed.

Other features that we thought of are:

  • End of week game challenge with personal avatar (user gives oral instructions to his avatar that virtually performs the tasks).
  • Rewards once a chapter or challenge has been successfully completed (example of rewards: free lessons, tickets or gift cards, certificate, etc
  • Bootcamp lessons
  • Virtual teacher avatar (interacts with and motivates the students)
  • Group learning and progress
  • 2-week challenge twice a year (during summer camp and once during winter): mixes lessons and exercises (are the same for each participant) and meet-up activities.

Now we have a better idea of the solution we want to develop, let’s have a look at what it might look like. We started with some low fidelity wireframes that we used to test with people from our age range (15–17).

Testing

We tested this prototype with 5 different testers who each went through the same scenario: create an account, take the test to define the current level, do a 7-day trial, start the first lesson and finish with the choice of an activity.

We rapidly noticed some issues with our prototype such as the answers page that was missing, some icons that were not detailed enough and that the testers did not understand, and an interesting fact, our testers and potential users don’t read buttons. They kind of guessed what they meant. For exemple, once they finished reviewing the lesson page, they would automatically click the next button, same once they finished reading the exercises page, they would click the next step link without reading it.

This lead them to be surprised when they landed on the last pages with the activities to chose. Even though we explained the scenario before starting the test, they did not know what to do with these last couple of pages.

This may be due to the environment of the test. We managed to find people in our age range, but the test conditions could be improve. We were seating in a restaurant, but there were a lot of noise and maybe we did not take as much time as we would have liked.

A more appropriate environment would have given us more confidence and time to explain the scenario and do the test in a more relaxed atmosphere.

InVison prototype

After reviewing our lofi prototypes on the white board, we started sketching the midfi prototypes using Sketch then InVision for the interaction:

How we got there

We were able to imagine this solution not only thanks to the interviews and methods to gather and analyse data and iterate over it, but also thanks to the user flow and site map we defined once we had a better understanding of who our users are and of their pain points.

We imagine the following user flow to be for our app, and the site map quickly followed:

Conclusion

The next steps would be to test our midfi prototypes, and improve them again.

Then we would need to go deeper into details of the main features, like precisely define the content of the profile and chat page.

Once all mid fi are done, we should test the complete first prototype with different scenarios and new testers.

Once this is done, we could start working on the high fidelity wireframes.

Overall I did not expect so much cooperation from the interviewees, nor to get such good insights and feedback in such a short period of time. I can only imagine how many better features we could have found with more time and a bigger team. We only need to choose the right methods and tools, and with some brain juice and listening skills, we are able to achieve so much iteration and ideas.

Here’s a little patchwork of the different methods and tools used during this project.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this solution interesting and maybe a little bit innovative. Share your comments below and help me improve for the next project :)

France A

Written by

France A

Hey there, I’m French, currently working for a software company and I want to develop new skills in UX/UI design. Looking forward to ready you all!

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