My first month at EF Class

konnaire
konnaire
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Who are you?

Hey, I’m Konnaire 👋🏼 I’ve been working as a Product Designer at EF Class for a few weeks now, and thought it’d be useful to share a little about me and my experiences here so far.

Previously, I was a founding member of an education start-up, and then worked for an agency with a focus on projects that have a strong social mission, a lot of which are education-based, so you could say I’m quite keen on working in the ed-tech space.

What’s EF Class?

EF Class is “a complete set of flexible learning materials and tools to help teachers run engaging, interactive, and motivational English lessons”, which translates to tons of amazingly crafted content, and loads of ways to deliver to and track your students’ progress.

What happened in your first week?

On my first day I tripped over while trying to drink a coffee, in front of Mags (our Lead Product Designer) and some other people I’d be working closely with, so that was good.

The first few days were a bit of a blur; as soon as I was through the door, I had a coffee put into my hand and was whisked into an all-team standup meeting, which was really useful to get grasp of the issues and problems the team would be tackling that week. After that, I had an onboarding meeting with Mags and Sam, the other product designer here at EF Class, followed by more onboarding meetings with a representative of every facet of EF Class to get a scope of the product so far.

The team took me out to lunch and drinks to celebrate my first day, which was a great way to get to know each other before my role really started.

What’s happened since then?

As soon as I was set up, the team and I took a deep-dive into a discovery and design task. We worked on exposing Problem Statements, building these out into Stories, and then finally low, medium, and high-risk Tasks that us designers could tackle. The team gave me everything I’d need to conduct some user research, compare any data I might need, and hypothesise some solutions to a few of the tasks I was working on.

Early-stage work on some of the stories I was working on

After a few informal design critiques where I showed off low-fidelity wireframes and talked through my thought process with Mags and Sam, I mocked everything up and dropped it into a working Principle prototype to demo to the rest of the team working on these Problem Statements at a product standup.

It was super refreshing to get a range of feedback from people with totally different skill sets and use cases for the product, and it gave me the confidence to work on a second iteration of these ideas — to create something we could hopefully put in front of teachers, our real users, in usability testing sessions. The team were so candid with their feedback, and helped me plan out the direction to move forwards with. Without wanting to sound cheesy, I left that meeting with a big grin on my face, thinking “this is what I’ve been looking for”.

A study in post-its — my desk after all the feedback had been collected

What are you excited about next?

Usability testing! Getting the thing I’ve been working on in front of a variety of our teachers and testing our work. EF Class are really fortunate in that we have a pretty diverse range of people to test on, going all the way from Toronto to London to Stockholm (and many more places in between) so we’re never short on different viewpoints to test with.

The team and I are heading to Porto soon to have our yearly kick-off session — 3 days of bonding, eating, and getting to know each other. I think I’ve definitely joined at a good time!


Want to find out more about EF Class? Head over to class.ef.com

Thoughts on design process, use cases and our day to day life

konnaire

Written by

konnaire

EF Class Design
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