Designing Revision Feature for BYJU’S The Learning App — A Case Study
BYJU’S is India’s largest ed-tech company. Launched in 2015, BYJU’S offers highly personalised and effective learning programs for classes 1–12 (K-12), and aspirants of competitive exams like JEE, UPSC etc.
In this article, I will go through my entire journey of designing the revision feature for the students of 4th — 10th grade.
The Problem
Learn, Revise & Practice are the 3 pillars of studying- this is pretty intuitive and has been validated across multiple user studies that the team did in the past year.
In the existing learning app, we have a defined path for students for personalised learning, practice and assessment through learn journeys, video library, games and quizzes. But when it comes to revision, we do not have a defined path for students on the app that can help them irevising their learnings.
In this scenario, students tend to skim through the library videos on app or use other modes of revision material like class notes, study material which result in students not using the Byju’s app and rather deviating in order to revise from other resources.
Validating the need of revision
We performed an initial survey among the students to determine the need for revision. The quantitative insights we got from the survey were :
- Around 40.6% and 48% of 90 students go through study material or important points and hand written notes respectively as mode of revision.
- Around 18.5% and 31.6% of the 90 students revise on daily and weekly basis respectively where as 17.6% and 22% revise just before the class tests and major exams respectively.
Various student centric methodologies were adopted to unravel the hidden meaning of ‘revision’ for students. 23 students were interviewed across 9 states of the country.
The interviews revolved around getting insights from the students on the following main questions:
- What does revision mean to kids?
- What are the triggers for doing revision?
- How are the kids currently revising?
These research insights helped us understand that we were biased in thinking that revision is just note-taking. In reality revision is a lot more, and note taking is just a component within revision.
We gathered the following insights from the research conducted :
- Students relied on digital notes, YouTube videos, flowcharts/mind maps.
- Various WhatsApp groups for doubt solving and note sharing during examinations.
- Use of diagrams for visualisation of concepts.
- Highlighting important stuff and marking important questions in textbooks.
We also understood a mental model of the students which helped us empathise with them better.
Interpreting The Data
Pain Points
User Revising Patterns and needs
We inferred that revision would be a valuable feature, as it was needed at different times by the students.
Based on the above information we segmented revision into two types based on the frequency at which students refer to their study material
- Daily/Weekly revision
This will be the place where the students can recall the important points in a concept/set of concepts (Sub parts of each topic) that were learned in the class. The magnitude of content could be little in depth which can help the students recall and retain their learnings.
- Exam Revision
This is the place where the students can recall all the important points at a chapter level just before the exam. The content here should give an overview of all the important points that a student would require just before the exams.
The formats were decided based on these segregation for the students to decide from which student wants to study.
- Quick Bytes : This covers all important points at a concept level. These concepts are subparts of each topic present under a subject which are required to revise a concept.
- Summary : This covers all important points at a topic level which are required to revise the topic from an exam stand point of view.
- Important Questions : All the important questions at a topic level can be provided here so that students can refer to them while practicing before an exam.
User Stories
One doubt came along the way, we knew what would be the best ways to show revision as per our students needs but revision would be a new feature in the app and we didn't want to miss any possibility to figure out any underlying oppurtunites. Therefore we got into the shoes of our users and defined few user stories.
As a student I want to
- Switch between video library, learn journeys and revision so that I can choose my mode of learning
- See different mode of revision material provided in a chapter so that I have visibility on different modes of material and choose as per my requirement
- Revisit important points at a concept level so that I can revise more frequently to retain my conceptual understanding
- Go through important points of a topic so that I can revise quickly before my exam
- Go through important questions of a topic so that I can revise quickly before my exam
- Take test which covers important question types from a topic so that I can assess my focus areas before my exam
- Quickly review the topics that I have learnt before leaving the app so that I can recollect my previous day’s learnings
- Understand how much time I have to spend on revision so that I can plan my time table accordingly
With these written down, we were very clear on all the possible opportunity areas throughout the student’s journey and thus started designing.
Quick Bytes
This covers all the important points at a concept level which are required to revise a concept and will come handy for everyday revision or even right before the exams.
Design decision: Since quick bytes were going to be small chunk of information, we wanted to choose a layout so that it could be consumed quickly. Our inspiration came from a hypothesis we made by discussing within our team, of how they consumed small information in their school days, the observation we made was that everyone learnt in form of flash cards and sticky notes, because it could be consumed quickly.
Therefore we decided to make quick bytes in form of flash cards. We tried different iterations for the the same.
Though we liked the second option the most, but after checking its feasibility on tablet, we realised the turn around time for these cards would be a lot because of the size constraint so we could not consider this version.
We decided to go with the first iteration — The horizontal scroll of cards, this would allow the users to grasp the information one at a time without being distracted with other flash cards. For easier scanning, we also gave a view all option.
Therefore now, Its easier for the students since they need not make digital notes of chapter level concepts.
Summary
This type of content would come very handy in times of exams as they were detailed understanding of any concept at a topic level, since this type of content required enough space and also they could be more in number as compared to Quick bytes, therefore we went ahead with the evergreen vertical scroll.
Important Questions
The type of content is self explanatory here. The challenge here was that there were various formats of questions like : questions with small and big images, questions with multiple options and multiple options with images, so it wasn’t possible to set any height limit here. We kept the cards dynamic so the card height will adhere to the content inside it.
Feature Discoverability
Last but not the least, there are two major touch points through which this feature can be accessed.
- Subject tiles on the homepage : Content is placed in a hierarchical manner in the app — Subject per grade > Chapters >Revision.
- Widget on the homepage for revision
Impact
The feature has been in the market with 40% of the BYJUs App users. These were some of the early insights we got.
- 20% of the Byjus app’s homepage users are using revision
- 75% of the users who had used revision on Day 0 are returning back and using revision
- Average completion rate of quick bytes (users who had started and completed quick bytes within a topic) is approx. 54% and this is increasing day by day.
You have reached the end!
During this project, I came to understand that to design a great feature, the overall experience of the user has to be kept in mind and product design is a collaborative process that involves a cycle of feedback and iteration to refine and improve the design.
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