Smart People - The UX Case Study
Designing a learning experience for young adults (Part 1)
The company
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 young adults from 18 to 21 years old.
Their main attraction is a summer camp. Hundreds of youngsters join every year in different locations, as they have an exceptional recipe: they integrate sports, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching a second language.
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.
Pre-Determined Goals
Our mission for the week is to make the Smart People Inc. summer camp curriculum accessible to students that are unable to attend due to time and money constraints. We are a team of 3 to create a minimum viable product (MVP) by the end of the week.
Our users’ age range is 18 to 21 years old.
How can we help these young adults learn a language entertainingly and engagingly?
How we planned our approach
We had around five working days to work on this project in teams of 3.
Although we each had our specialties, we tried switching between roles to keep an eye on every step of the design process.
Not only did we divide the work equally, but we communicated a lot as a team to agree on our goals and be more efficient. We decided on a UX strategy and started writing the survey questions. We also did some benchmarking on summer camps and language learning.
Using the Agile methodology, we had daily stand-ups in the morning to know what has been done, what needs to be done, and what problems need to be resolved. We also shared a checklist of things to do for the day on our Slack channel, to make sure we were all on the same page.
Our roles in the project
Even though we decided to divide the task effectively, the three of us wore many hats for this project:
User researcher
This included setting up a meeting with the users, both online, in person and over the phone, gathering data via interviews, surveys, and discussions.
Information architect
When people navigate a page or an app with ease, it was not by accident. Concerned with the navigation of the product, and it is their job to plan the structure of the page and the site so that users can reach their end goal in an intuitive, logical way. The information architect is also concerned with helping users fully understand where they currently are on the site.
User Interface designer
A User Interface designer is responsible for the look and feel of a site. Using the research gathered, the User Interface designer seeks to create a clean and functional design based on the requirements already identified.
Usability Tester
A usability tester is in charge of evaluating a product by testing it on groups of users to check its functionality, usability, and ease of use. From this feedback, the product can then be redesigned and improved upon.
Research and results
To start collecting user data, we used these tools: user surveys, Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) interviews, and market research.
Our surveys specifically targetted 18 to 21-year-olds and were in two versions (English and French). Since we didn’t have the budget for paid surveys, we were looking for free users. Facebook groups were beneficial, as were our close connections.
In parallel to sending surveys and doing JTBD interviews, we decided to do our market research and competitor analysis.
Market Research & competitor analysis
Quantitative data: survey results
We had thirty answers to the English survey and thirty answers to the French survey. With this data, we realized that socializing was very important to our users. We also found that they liked to be active while learning.
Qualitative data: JTBD interviews highlights
We had three jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) interviews, and we discovered that social interaction was a valuable learning aspect for our users. These young adults we interviewed were very enthusiastic about the subject, giving us tips and telling us stories about their learning experiences online and in real life.
Here are some of the interviews’ highlights:
“It’s hard to replicate a summer camp online. We need the energy and emulations of group activities.”
“ Travelling is a way of learning the language through in-country immersion.”
“I like an application to be fun and I want to feel the community effect.”
Persona and journey map
Based on our interviews, our research, and our results, we created our persona, Jennifer Reid, an enthusiastic 18-year-old high school graduate.
We also tried to understand her “Learning a new language” journey with a typical language learning book. The main pain points are aligned with the loss of interest and boredom moments you can notice in her journey.
Data download: Affinity diagram
After collecting data and interview insights, we had to choose a tool to download our data. We chose the affinity diagram; we felt that a lot of common subjects were standing out from our results, and we needed a way to reveal these subjects. An affinity diagram is a method used to sort and organize research findings so that one can physically see trends and relationships in data.
The Problem Statement
After downloading and analyzing our data, writing the problem statement was a bit of a challenge for us. The first drafts were either too broad, too vague, or tackling too many problems at the same time. We kept going back to our data to come up with a solid problem statement.
Jennifer, the enthusiastic high school graduate, needs to learn another language while socializing because she wants to be bilingual, but she’s struggling to stay motivated learning by herself, she feels lonely and bored.
How might we help her stay motivated and entertained while learning?
Ideating
After defining our problem statement, we decided to start the ideation process. Through idea generation or ideation, we generate as many ideas as we can then. We then refine these ideas by dot-voting to concentrate on a selection of ideas.
Crazy eight
Crazy 8 is an ideation exercise where we come up with 6 to 8 crazy ideas in 8 minutes (1 min for every idea).
After dot voting, we chose two main ideas and iterated through a quick round-robin exercise (each person uses their neighbor’s design as inspiration to iterate and create another one).
Low-fi wireframes and wire-flow
Before moving to the mid-fi prototype, we quickly drew a wire-flow, a mix of low fidelity prototype, and user-flow (the earlier you test, the easier it is to fix an error).
Once we felt that we were ready to prototype: Feedback time! Design feedback is an integral part of any successful design project. It allows the clients to review and critique a design solution that was presented.
As a team, we tried never to get overly attached to previous ideas.
Let’s have a small ideating process to rework our solution before moving to the next step.
We went back to our problem statement and our crazy eight ideas. We ideated on two ideas that we felt were closer to the path of finding a solution.
Pain point: Learning a language the traditional way can be boring.
Design solution: Make a language learning app that feels like a game while keeping it social so they can practice with each other. Our application connects our users with other users of the same interests. Upon sign up the students has the option to choose which language he/she wants to learn.
Mi-fi Wireframes
The spinning wheel randomly picks its mission, and the users are then randomly teamed with other users. Once the mission has been accepted, the team has 24 hours to finish the task.
Mini-missions, the purpose of the mini-missions is to have the users learn by this pain point: Jennifer finds it challenging to stay motivated and engaged in an online learning app.
Design Solution
Have the users upload videos of their missions and sharing them with their friends. One of our users’ pain points was getting distracted by social media while studying.
Ratings, having the users input what they learned from their mission and have them track their progress. Based on our research findings, users prefer to keep track of their performances. It helps them stay motivated to reach their goals and learning experience and creating memorable experiences.
Our prototype live in Marvel:
Mid Fi prototype recording
> https://marvelapp.com/7hd86bh/screen/63079395
> https://youtu.be/y9AiZ0TE-QQ
About the next steps
After testing the prototype with the same people from the JTBD interview, we know that another round of iteration is necessary (we did fix a few details like add a layer of explanation for the mission chat)
- An archive is an essential feature for our testers to go back to the videos they recorded and review the crucial learnings.
- Another step would be a quick syllabus to contain some essential words.
Thank you for reading :)
Following this post, I published the UI design process for this same application, you can read it here: Smart People — The UI Case Study.
