The Benefits of drawing parallels
A good user experience is (mostly)always relatable and mapped with your user’s expectations. Best way to do build that is creating product flows based on your user’s mental modal.
Most of the flows that we try to build in our products are already present in real world, you just need to keep your eye out for them. Try to observe users in different settings and try to internalise what they are doing, how they are interacting, what choices they are making and why. You do that, and you will be able to solve most of the product problems. Although you have have to be careful while drawing parallels.
To illustrate, I’d like to talk about a similar experience I had solving a problem for Vedantu.
To give you a brief idea, Vedantu is an Online tutoring service which connects handpicked awesome teachers with students in a LIVE environment. Hence, enabling one of its kind personalised learning.
There are courses with set curriculum and schedule that a student can take up with their choice of teacher who will teach them LIVE.
Recently, we came across a peculiar problem.
Problem
Even when the curriculum & schedule was set at the beginning of the course, teachers were not particularly following it and were not taking timely assessments which was creating problems with reporting and follow ups with parents.
After a round of discussion, we realised the root of the problem was how the product was built. Curriculum was treated as ‘instructions’ and was in no way forcing or even reminding teachers to follow it. If the product is taking it casually, so will the users.
Approach
This is where real world mapping comes in. To solve this problem, we started thinking how similar flow behaves in real world? Ideally, you should go and observe this scenario in a school / coaching centre or discuss with a teacher or institute owner themselves. But our founders being teachers themselves in past, we didn't have to look further.
Over the discussion with one of our founders we got to know that there is regular tracking that an institute does which keeps teachers on their toes, a combined assessment across all batches has to happen at pre-scheduled dates which forces teachers to complete a set of curriculum before the deadline and similar things like this that an institute enforces which makes teachers adhere to curriculum and schedule, but these were all operational solutions, what we were looking for was a behaviour which can be replicated.
Digging in deeper, we found that as a practice, teachers discuss what they have covered previously before starting every lecture and what they have covered today at the end of every lecture. In addition to this, they also give assignments to complete (if any) at the end. We realised that this simple behaviour is in-fact devised by teachers themselves to make sure they keep a track of their curriculum coverage and in turn enabling compliance.
Immediately we knew this was the solution. To replicate the behaviour, we built a curriculum tracker which was a part of our LIVE session itself.
How it works:
• At the end of every LIVE session, the tracker opens automatically prompting teachers to discuss and update what they have taught today.
• It’s visible to both teacher and students to ensure transparency.
• In addition to curriculum tracking, teachers can share tests & assignments to their students then and there.
• At the start of the next session, previous session’s update is visible for a quick recap.
The Result
• Over 90% of teachers are updating and following curriculum.
• No curriculum compliance related queries from parents anymore.
• Timely sharing of tests and assignments increased by 45%
Closing Thoughts
Incorporating a new behaviour or changing an exsisting one is a call which needs to be taken very responsibly. It’s a huge cognitive effort for a user to adapt to it, at the same time, will require a huge product design cycle as well.
Try to map the problem you are solving with a behaviour that users are familiar with. Users perceive a product to be more seamless if it’s usage is mapped with their mental modal.
