SheSABI - Vocational Skills Learning App for low-income Women
Contributions: Product Management, Product Design, Brand Design
Marketing Design, Product Strategy, Interaction Design.
Duration: Dec 2020 — Apr 2021
Collaborators: Waliyu Raji (Android Developer), Jabir Minjibir (Backend Developer)
Overview
Technology is rapidly changing the normal systems of the world; healthcare, transportation, welfare, finance, even education is not left behind. As such, there exist numerous opportunities for improving the way of life for the common man. However, there is a large gender divide in accessing these opportunities.
Why then is there a need for gender balance?
Technological adoption in a variety of industries and the female gender need not be left out, considering that women and girls are less privileged and more bereft of opportunities than men, such an exclusion gap is detrimental to the economy, to one’s self, and in the long term to generations unborn. In order to put an end to this damning apparatus, more opportunities for the female folk to thrive needs to be adopted. One of such opportunities; SheSABI, is what this case study seeks to disclose.
The SheSABI APP aims to train and empower young girls and women in low-income areas of the society. The focus is to provide vocational, business, digital, and financial literacy skills needed for an honorable living. English, Pidgin, and the local dialects of Nigerians are the languages of instruction/communication. This is done to enable massive outreach to the people on the grassroots level.
SheSABI helps them learn, start, sustain and succeed in their businesses. The design aids easy learning (for free), getting a certification, and access to funds, grants, and loans from the Mamamoni Empowerment Foundation.
Goals
Expectations for this project are quite clear;
- Create a product that would empower the female folk with skills they can learn digitally.
- Enable a continuous cycle of women empowerment through the beneficiaries giving back to the community.
- Reduce the gap between the female gender and digital opportunities.
- Reinforce the female capacity to thrive in an opportunity-scarce continent like Africa.
Research findings.
To adequately understand the problem I was solving, getting more context was important. The goal of my research was to understand the pain points of my demographic as well as discover gaps in the market that I could capitalize upon to build a more refined and user-centric product.
Considering the input I got from my research, I was able to make some certainties;
- The Product needed to have intuitive navigation that users wouldn’t find intimidating
- The majority of the potential users of the product are not very familiar with using digital products.
- The content design of the product needed a localized content strategy, including tone and voice.
- Low internet penetration and access to sufficient mobile data indicate the need to have learners watch and download course videos with little data usage.
Persona
After careful consideration of my research and findings, understanding the problems to be solved and target audience, I came up with a persona to perfectly fit in a classic SheSabi App user.
User flow & Wireframes Ideation
Using the core task flow I started to ideate on what the interface of my application could be. From early Sketches to low-fidelity designs. with this, I was able to test and validate assumptions and findings with users,
while they verbally communicated what they were doing, thinking, and feeling.
Each user was asked to follow the following tasks:
- Create an account
- Select language and skills
- Find course content
- Answer test quiz questions
- Upload course project images
- Download certificates to their phones.
Iterate. Then iterate again
What we learned;
- Search for modules and lessons was something that was pointed out by many users.
- Progress of course been offered.
- Users were interested to see what they will get after the course. Certificates, follow-up courses.
- Flow to contact the instructor is confusing and requires extra effort
The Solutions
Considering the goals I had listed out at the beginning of the study, I proceeded to make and ideate solutions that would resolve the pain points of my target audience.
Language
To solve the problems of the language barrier, users have the option of choosing courses in their preferred language, as well as accompanying subtitles.
Easy to watch and download videos
Due to slow internet connectivity and access to mobile data, I worked closely with the back-end developer to work on a compression engine for the videos, which makes the videos smaller in size and easier to start watching in a flash and download on their mobile phones with low mobile data.
Personalization
For the sake of personalization, the user gets to make a selection of their most preferred skill to learn at that point in time, during onboarding.
Certificate download upon Completion
Learners can download and share their certificates with friends and loved ones upon completing a skill. This feature serves as an incentive and motivation to want to complete a course.
Gamification for Quizzes
Testing learners’ knowledge after every lesson using game-like quizzes helps users solidify knowledge of the course subject.
Assignments
In addition to simple multiple-answer quizzes, learners are assigned a practical task to complete as well as write their thoughts about how they will use what they have just learned.
Reward System
Nothing encourages people more than getting rewarded for a task. So when a learner refers others to learn using their referral codes, they get rewarded.
Offline Learning
Students can access course modules without the internet. This feature is equally important because a large part of the target audience does not constantly have access to the internet, and this also enables them to learn at any time, at their convenience.
Considering the fact that my target audience was largely women who aren’t too familiar with tech, I empathize with them and sought to make the user flow as straightforward and intuitive as possible. Emphasis was on creating a product that was functional as well as easy to navigate.
Learnings and Key Takeaways
It is my belief that Shesabi will go a long way in bridging the divide in digital literacy among the female gender. After the launch of Shesabi, certain outcomes were realized and these outcomes will help inform iterative decisions moving forward.
We discovered there was low retention of users on the platform. Although there is a Telegram group where learners can ask questions and interact with fellow learners, we agreed (with stakeholders) that a more viable solution to users retention on the platform would be to create in-app community support, that will help motivate users, provide resources and help foster a community of growth.
We also noticed inadequate motivation and untimely completion of courses among learners. To this, we plan on incorporating a leader-board & reward system where learners taking similar courses will see each others’ progress, and rewards are given on basis of the fastest completions.
Impacts
- Upon launch, the SheSabi App has recorded over 1000 downloads with an average rating of 4.1 on the Google Playstore.
- 65% Course completion rates among learners on the SheSABI App
SheSABI was also just recently named as a finalist at the 2021 EQUALS in Tech Awards (https://www.equalsintech.org/post/2021-equals-in-tech-awards-finalists)
