Project 3 : Smart People
Smart People
Company’s Introduction

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.
Even if this is dope…
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 Summer Camp
- 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. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.
Challenge
This project is about creating an online learning platform for 12–21-year-old students. It will transform the in-person learning experience into a digital experience that can be accessed by students at a lower cost.
User Research
Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews
What is it ?
“Knowing more and more about customers — is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance — what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done.” (Clayton M. Christensen et al.,2016)
We did some interviews with people between 18 and 21 years old, most of them on chat because the people we interviewed were more at ease to speak by chat than when it’s face to face. The interviews lasted about 10 to 15 min each and were performed in French.
We adapted the questions according to the responses of our participants. This allowed us to collect very interesting answers.
Survey
The second tool we used was the survey. We used it to be able to touch a largest scale of people in therms of geographic location.

Some questions we asked were the following ones :
- Do you speak several languages?
- What would you expect from an e-learning app to teach you new languages?
- Do you use learning apps?
- What do you think of online training? On an app?
Interviews and Survey Analysis
After our interviews and surveys, we manage to found some problems and wishes our user can have :
- The user have the willingness to learn a new language but can’t find app that are playful enough. They get bored very fast and drop the use of the app.
- The users are not very motivated and can be a little bit lazy so they need to have a feedback, preferably in videos to be able to have the good pronunciation when they do some mistakes.
- The users don’t want to spend to much money on the app but are not against having to pay for one if this is a complete app (like not having to spend money after paying for the formula to have more options)
- The users wants to be able to meet with other people to chat or debates. They thinks this will help them more with the confidence to talk in an other language and the pronunciation.
Benchmark
For the benchmark, we did some research on other languages app like DuoLingo, Babel, LingoDeer …etc
We found out this app were not proposing any feedbacks after the exercises and that they were proposing almost the same things (same exercises …)
Market Positioning
We tried to evaluate where we needed to place our product in comparison with the competitors. The Market Positioning is used to understand where a product or service is located based on specific qualities in the market.
And obviously we needed to know :
- where our product was currently lying in the market versus where we wanted it to be
- Identifying gaps in the market that our offering could take advantage of and turned it into an opportunity

Define
Persona and User Journey
We decided to focus on two pain points which are the the fact that most app are not fun enough and the fact that users need a real follow up.
We started to define our persona from what we found in our user research and the pain points we decided to focus on.

And the user journey :

- How might we help Thomas to have more motivation to learn a language ?
- How might we help Thomas to have the possibility to learn while having fun ?
- How might we help Thomas to know where he is in his learning ?
- How might we help Thomas to have practically the same social experience with the app that he should have had by going to the Summercamp ?
Problem Statement
Thomas, the lazy senior high learner, needs a way to learn a new language, by mixing social activities and exercises because currently he struggle to find motivation and engaging app.
Ideate
We used the tool Moscow methods to find which features were vital for our app.

After a little bit more investigation we decided not to take all the features that we had in mind, of course, by lack of time.
We agreed to keep tree features that we thought were the most relevant. Then we decided to create a sitemap that will help us to know how the skeleton of our application will look. We were able to visualize where would be the features in the app and then, to be able to do the Lo-Fi wireframes.
Thomas needs to learn while having fun. He loses all motivations when he finds himself in front of regular lessons, that’s why, we decided to make a rather playful exercises system.
The lessons and exercises are arranged in the form of courses. Each course is composed of 6 modules, all concentrated on a particular series.
Exercise 1 : The oral exercise consists of watching an extract from an episode of a series, then reading the corresponding dialogue below and recording yourself by “playing” the dialogue. This exercise is intended to help with pronunciation.
Exercise 2 : This exercise is a duel between 2 students of the course. They will have 6 rounds with 3 questions per rounds. The questions will be either on grammar, on the series or on the vocabulary they learned in the lesson.
At the end of each course, Thomas will have the opportunity to have a personalized feedback, made by a teacher, who will explain his strengths and weaknesses. The feedbacks will be in videos, for the problems with pronunciation and Thomas will also have a feedback wrote with points under the video. He will also have the possibility to have access to the each feedbacks he had in his profile in a space specially for that.
Also, and in order to maintain a social and friendly relationship, Thomas will have the opportunity to participate in events, such as marathon series, sports sessions, theater or cooking workshops, which will be organized by and with students present on the platform. Of course, these activities will only be provided in the language being learned.
Wireframes

Prototype
Next steps
Finally the moment of test ! We asked 5 persons with totally different profiles to test remotely our prototype and give us their feedbacks. We learned a lot, and it allows us to find some really interesting thing to improve and to add to our application.
- Add explanatory screens either at the very beginning or in the form of small bubbles, when using the application for the first time.
- Put the “E-learning” feature in the burger menu and feedback on Home for more harmonization.
- In the feature “Events”: Remove the two buttons “I participate” and “I do not participate” because too small and not very useful at this point. Display on the list the number of remaining places to be able to see in a “wink” the events where it is necessary to register as soon as possible and a system of tag on the events like for example “film / series / cuisine “,” Fantastic / gastronomic vocabulary “….
- Having the possibility to add a comment when noting the event and/or the host of the event. With, of course, a feature in addition to the profile where all comments will be transcribed by events.
- For the course feature, have a page where it is possible to see the list of all courses already done, the current one and the next ones to unlock. This will return to old exercises easily if needed, and especially to have an idea of where we are. So, allow to have a sense of achievement at the sight of your evolution in the course.
Conclusion
It was again very interesting to work with a new person with totally different point of view and ways of doing at times. The last feedbacks on our prototypes were so helpful to identify our problems in the app, I really enjoyed this part. At every project, I see myself growing a little bit more in the UX universe ! I’m more and more sure about the fact that this is a good path for me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my case study, I hope you liked it!
To be continued..
