PART 1: The Context, Vision & Strategy
Designing India’s largest online tuition platform for BYJU’S[Part 1/3]
My leadership experience as Director of Product Design at BYJU’S
PART 1: The Context, Vision & Strategy
I was both excited and nervous at the same time when I was allowed to build a team from scratch while working on the project. The stakes were high for me, both professionally and personally, but I decided to take the plunge anyway.
To start, I began by understanding the project's long-term vision, which was crucial in aligning all stakeholders to a common immediate mission.
Overall, this project was an incredible learning experience. Within a year, It became India’s largest online tuition platform with 100,000+ paid users and the largest revenue-making product for the brand BYJU’S. Beyond serving this as an archive for myself, I hope the insights will help others who are in similar situations. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the vision of this exciting project!
“We hope to make a difference in the lives of millions of students by providing an effective digital alternative to traditional learning models where students from all over the world can experience the magic of in-person lessons taught by expert teachers. We must leverage technology to deliver the best features of traditional tuition and improve learning quality in a variety of ways to inspire digital natives to fall in love with remote synchronous learning”.
A brief context from the beginning(2020–21)
Due to the pandemic in 2020, virtual classrooms went from being a good-to-have to a must-have overnight. Conducting synchronous classes online was not easy, and many were forced to make do with makeshift arrangements using technology that was originally designed for tech-first corporate users.
With prolonged lockdowns in the country, there was an extreme sense of urgency from both the business and the users, who were in dire need of better solutions to bridge the gap. The COVID-19 pandemic ended up delivering our future users a bit earlier in 2020 than expected.
Here is a quick glimpse of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system during 2020–21.
The spaces where learning now takes place have changed in various ways for each student. The economic disparities of families have brought contrasting experiences to students in the same class when it comes to how one receives the same education. The following is a quick glimpse of various students attending their online classes (mostly collected from publically available resources online)
The gap between the product we needed v.s. the product we wanted
As they say, no amount of iteration can turn a wax candle into an electric light bulb because such a transformation requires a paradigm shift. The initial version of the product was a quick response to the pandemic and was released in a hurry. I realized that the design infrastructure was not strong enough to support the ambitious new vision for the product. However, the quick release enabled our team to learn many valuable lessons within a short period.
I argued that a mere transactional product would not be sufficient to sustain a competitive market for the age group we were dealing with, and I supported this argument with evidence. Although I faced a few challenges, I was determined to pursue the stakeholders to create a product that would meet the needs of our users and reflect our larger vision for the future.
It was a mammoth challenge ahead of me as a new design leader who just joined, to propose a complete infrastructural level rework when the first version of the product was already live. I knew that it would not be possible by some aspirational talk alone. I decided to prepare my pitch parallelly.
The first milestone for me was to align the business stakeholders with the rearticulated vision of the project. The second was to throw some light on the potential consequences of building the product on an inadequate infrastructure and the future bottlenecks in creating a seamless experience-based solution.
Determining the right starting point for a new product journey can often be a tough challenge for a designer.
I started with a pitch narrative that traces the route back from the successful state of the project with confidence with a series of logical steps to the beginning. Following is the image that represents the plan.
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The core of the pitch was to look at starting the whole thing from the primary user motivations and solve this riddle. And breaking it into smaller logical steps allowed everyone to see the unified bigger picture and have better confidence in the new direction.
The team proactively started exploring further in anticipation of our pitch being successful. We had some interesting insights into the primary users(students/parents) from the pilot version and also explored some moonshot ideas to make sure the design infrastructure is future-proof.
So it starts with exploring the core motivations of the users; a pretty abstract place to be. Here is how we decided to break that down into more actionable directions.
I started the whole exercise by borrowing the brand’s tagline of ‘making children fall in love with learning and from there I picked ‘PLAY’ as a theme to dive deeper into the core motivations.
The outcome was a set of 6 design outcomes based on core user motivations that would help us understand the clear WHY behind the WHAT design interventions we propose. More importantly, it helps in discovering gaps and new opportunities by going beyond the obvious transactional value(Learning) that everyone provides anyway. (initially, there were 5 outcomes, we added another one later as it made sense)
The crux of the pitch was focused on the idea of increasing the users’ willingness to participate via enhanced user satisfaction by taping into the core motivations drive their decisionmaking. It ultimately aims at a higher customer lifetime value(up to 9 years in this case) to the business through retention and referrals.
This strategy was built on the primary question of what makes ‘Play’ so attractive to children, how they come back to it willingly and what we could learn from it.
Many more inarticulated needs are being served that make them come back, and my focus was to decode these nuances that make the learning experience a holistic one, like a play.
This strategic direction was drawn from my previous experiences in gamification and the studies made around it. [If you want to understand more about gamification please read my other article here]
The core 6 design outcomes as strategic direction for the new version
The actual learning becomes a play only when all the other elements in the game fall into place and help the players find a reason to play. Here is how it translated into cohort-based learning through a digital interface/product.
- Social interaction: Ice breaks, Casual games to enable student-to-student interactions, Non-curricular activities, etc.
- Recognition: Rewards for encouraging good behaviours, Badges of appreciation via fun gamification, etc.
- Relationships: Opportunities to connect voluntarily with a set of peers beyond the classroom environment and form better bonds enabling higher learning outcomes, etc.
- Learning: Additional features and tools to enable better learning outcomes like an interactive whiteboard, Digital study groups, Digital productivity tools, etc.
- Competence: Inspirations, Assurances, skill development, Peer-mentoring, feedback loops, digital well-being, Self-awareness, etc.
- Ease of use: Creating an interface that is not only intuitive and fun but also encourages people to focus on the job to be done and best optimise time and effort.
This framework stood as the foundational guardrail to protect the vision of the product. As a leader, it was an intentional act to make design interventions a conscious contribution to improve the product holistically, than just going with where the wind blows. Without such structures, it is easier for teams to drift towards the obvious looking features alone and ignore the others when we get into the thick of things.
[Later, I hired a behaviour science professional in my team for further research support. She and I explored this further in-depth. Here is the link to that exploration if you want to read further]
The second innings of the project & the impact
The pitch went well and from the very next day onwards the team started working in a new strategic direction. Internally we called it ‘NEO CLASSES’ to differentiate the new from the old.
What worked in our favour was the concerns raised by Byju Raveendran (CEO) himself by stepping into the role of a teacher himself to explain the product we needed. He focussed on setting up the right environment for learning where digital modalities are not a distraction but an enabler. E.g., a chat as a core communication method was something he recognised as an obstacle rather than an enabler.
Once the new product was ready, we seamlessly migrated all the customers into the new environment. The only metric that mattered at this early stage was the Average Available Watchtime Time (AAWT). The product update drastically improved this metric and it means the engagement on the product is in the direct direction for version zero.
Neo Classes then went on to become one of the most successful and revenue-making products for the brand BYJU’S. Later this product became the preferred choice for the business and adopted the interface for delivering a various other synchronous learning services under the brand.
Of course, it is not just the student-facing interface design that brought this success. It would not have been possible without a robust backend product ecosystem enabled by the product managers, the operations team and the engineering team who worked at an incredible speed and efficiency to make this switch sooner.
A glimpse of the old v.s. the new designs.
doubts posted by students on chat are resolved by trained tutors on the chat itself.
Please find the link to the second part below.
<read part 2/3>
