Mooji App
Bringing the summer camp experience to you
This project was a five-day challenge we carried out with my great colleague Kana during the Ironhack Berlin Bootcamp. Despite the long hours and late nights, I enjoyed the project very much and had a lot of fun.
Introduction
Smart People Inc is a fictitious company offering in-person language courses and their main activity is the language summer camp they organised for teenagers aged 12 to 18.
- Problem: they’re finding many students are unable to attend the summer camp due to cost and time reasons, but still want to access the curriculum.
- Goal: Smart People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students who cannot attend the summer camp.
- Challenge: Create an online learning app for 12–18 year old students and make the in-person learning experience a 100% digital one, that can be accessed by students who can’t attend the summer camp.
Research
Qualitative Research
Initially, we wanted to focus our research on students, as they would be the end customer using the app. After brainstorming, we actually decided to focus our research on teachers, as they would give us more valuable insights. Indeed, they are the ones dealing with students all day long and they know what teaching methods exist, which ones work best, etc.
Using a lean survey canvas , we identified the following:
- What do we want to learn?
- What do we know already?
- Who do we need to learn from?
- How do we reach to these people?
Interview results
From the interviews, it transpired that teaching should be a mix of elearning and traditional methods. There was a clear trend showing that elearning is very valuable for students to have the content of their course available to them all year long. Results also showed that the best way to learn was to learn the theory first and then apply it in activities.
We got some very insightful discussions with various teachers, and below are a few quotes that helped us build our problem statement later on:
[Students need] “material that empowers them and makes them take ownership of their learning”
“eLearning is the future in terms of language learning”
“feedback is extremely important and should always be constructive”
It is often hard to know at what level to pitch your material
You need to learn theory to apply later in activities
Define
By combining the data from the interviews with other researches our colleagues had made (affinity diagrams) we came up with two user personas, one student and one teacher.
User Persona
- Adam Weber, the easily distracted student. He’s 16, studies at International High school in Berlin and loves sport. What he doesn’t like however is school, especially Spanish classes where he isn’t confident speaking in front of his classmates. He wished there was a cool way for him to learn Spanish.
- Mrs Honey, the caring teacher. She’s 62 and teaches Spanish at UCL in London. She’ll be retired soon and would like to carry on teaching part time. She’s frustrated about not keeping up with the times in terms of technology as she sees elearning the future in terms of learning languages.
How might we
With well-defined personas, we now had a better understanding of our problem. Our initial challenge, which was really broad, could now be narrowed done and better defined. After a brainstorming session, we agreed that our main focus should be:
How might we help students feel more confident and inspired when learning a language?
Ideate
Now that our problem statement was clearly defined, we started the ideation phase. Using mindmapping methods, we brainstormed a lot and used the crazy 8s to generate visual solutions.
Similar process was used to know what features we’d like to have on the app. As timing was a big constraint, we prioritised the features using the MOSCOW map and determine which features we:
- Must have
- Should have
- Could have
- Wouldn’t have
At this stage we had a better idea of potential solutions, and could start working on our sitemap. Doing some card sorting allowed us to get an external point of view and to review our sitemap according to the feedback we had got.
Once we knew what would be in the app, we focused on creating a user flow, which consisted in the happy flow and alternative flows.
Solution
Looking at our problem statement and research, we wanted to create a friendly, intuitive, positive and inspiring app that would build confidence, where there would be no competition.
That’s where Mooji was born. The idea behind Mooji is to have a pet avatar that you take care of (Tamagotchi generation..). The more you learn, the more Mooji grows. The student’s aim is to keep Mooji happy by doing the everyday lesson.
Prototype
Then came the time for prototyping. Not to lose time, we did a low fidelity wireframe and tested it on people. We got some great feedback that allowed us to improve our prototype before starting the mid-fidelity one.
Mid fidelity prototype
Although it was a paper prototype, we wanted the user to be able to get a proper feeling of the brand. That is why even in our mid fidelity wireframe, we chose to integrate our little character ‘Mooji’ and let the use personalise it.
Testing
Testing is a crucial step in the process and testing our paper prototype allowed us to spot what needed to be changed and how we could improve our current wireframe. As we were getting feedback, we were modifying our prototype based on the feedback. A lot of testing, modifying and iterating.
Mid-Fi Wireframe
Based on the feedback we replicated our paper wireframe into Sketch. As we tested our low fidelity wireframe many times, we were pretty much ready to go! Although we still tested our mid-fi wireframe to make sure it was smooth-less.
