Teach Anything
A platform to make workshops more accessible to anyone who wants to run them.
For our second project, my teammates and I were assigned the topic of Education to ideate and create a responsive website on both mobile and desktop for anything that fell under the topic. Through user research, the idea of Teach Anything was born.
*Freeze frame*
We all know the premise of one of the best Disney/Pixar movies, Ratatouille, and Auguste Gusteau’s famously quoted tagline, “anyone can cook.” We wanted to bring the same idea to anyone with talents outside of their traditional jobs wanting to set up workshops to share their knowledge with their communities. However, due to a lack of resources, many of them don’t know where to start and get frustrated by the obstacles in their way.
My Role: UX Designer | Duration: 1.5 weeks
Scope of Work
My team and I were tasked with creating a responsive website for both mobile and desktop in the Education space. Through our initial brainstorming process, we landed on creating a platform to make workshop hosting a more tangible and feasible thing to do.
UX Design Process: The Double Diamond Method
We used the UX Double Diamond method, which is broken out into two phases: the research phase and the design phase.
Hypothesis, Assumptions, and Initial Problem Statement
After we decided to hone in the workshop creation process, we drew our hypothesis and assumptions: Workshop instructors find it difficult to start their own workshops because there are no readily available resources. They will want easy access to event spaces without jumping through too many hoops, an easy way for potential workshop attendees to discover their workshops, and better communication with venue owners.
From there, our Initial Problem Statement was created:
How might we help workshop instructors facilitate workshops in a more efficient manner?
Goal of Research and Methodology
In order to fully understand what actually goes into creating a workshop, including what motivates these people to start them and run them and identify issues they’ve run into in the past, we interviewed five people who ran workshops in the last year to hear about their experiences. We were luckily able to find several different people with different backgrounds ranging from dance to photography.
In addition to learning so much about everyone’s diverse backgrounds, we also learned that most, if not all, of the interviewees were frustrated with the logistical aspect of creating and running a workshop because it ate into the time they could be using to perfect and refine their classes for their students.
“Ideally as someone who teaches a workshop, you want to just focus on the contents and focus on making that good, but it’s a little hard to focus on the experience when you have you worry about the logistics.”
Synthesis to Affinity Mapping
- Users are passionate about their field of expertise and are motivated by giving back to their community.
- In larger cities, finding and securing workshop spaces is especially difficult for users.
- Because users are worried about the logistics, they’re unable to focus on the actual content of their workshop.
- Users largely used social media to market and find attendees for their workshops.
- Users would like to know more about the skill level of workshop participants and why they are taking it before the day of.
- Even though profit is not the key driver for users, they still must make sure they can cover cost and their time, which can be frustrating and time consuming.
Meet Heather!
Our data led us to Heather, a culmination of the information that we learned from our research that lets us empathize with our audience to understand their goals, needs, and frustrations. We also created Heather’s journey map of when she wants to create a workshop. As you can see, the highs and lows are pretty significant; she’s excited when she sees the fruits of her labor coming together, but her excitement is thwarted by all of the logistical aspects of putting together her workshop.
Revised Problem Statement
Bringing our research phase to a close, we finalized our problem statement:
The logistics of organizing a workshop interfere with instructors’ ability to refine the content of their workshops.
As a result, Heather feels frustrated that she needs to compromise her creative process with the ins and outs of running a workshop.
How might we help her focus on creating her workshop without having to deal with the headache of organizing?
Insights to Features
Taking the insights that we drew from our affinity mapping, we honed in on the features that would make Heather’s life much easier when it came to creating workshops.
- Provide assistance on the backend (ticketing, contacting space owners, etc.) \\ Users are passionate about their field of expertise and are motivated by giving back to their community. Because users are worried about the logistics, they’re unable to focus on the actual content of their workshop.
- Ability to book spaces within our network of vetted venues directly on our website. \\ In larger cities, finding and securing workshop spaces is especially difficult for users.
- Ability to share workshops directly from the workshop page (social icons, etc.) \\ Users largely used social media to market and find attendees for their workshops.
- Attendee profile pages with information that they’re required to fill out when signing up for a workshop (skill level, etc.) \\ Users would like to know more about the skill level of workshop participants and why they are taking it before the day of.
- Budget tracker and optimizer to help instructors manage their money. \\ Even though profit is not the key driver for users, they still must make sure they can cover cost and their time, which can be frustrating and time consuming.
For our minimum viable product (MVP), we needed to prioritize which of the features she needed were the most important to make our website function at its core. We used a MoSCoW map, which stands for must, should, could, won’t. By categorizing the features into this map, we were able to visually determine what the most important elements were. Taking the MoSCoW map into consideration, we further refined which features were a priority for our initial product. We did this by organizing the features into a feature prioritization matrix. Ultimately, the elements that landed in Essential and Low Effort/Low Expense were the features we focused our attention on for the MVP.
Designing Wireframes and Usability Testing
Introducing… Teach Anything! Our platform makes workshops accessible for any expert who wants to share their knowledge with their community without the hassle. T/A streamlines the process by bringing together all of the key elements an instructor would need to start, like booking spaces and tracking resources.
It didn’t look that great from the get-go; our team went through a ton of iterations to get to this point.
Usability Testing
Clickable prototype of our mid-fidelity wireframes here.
After determining which features were the most pertinent for our MVP, we conducting two rounds of usability testing to ensure that our website addressed the goals and pain points of our target audience. We tested ten users total, five for our mid-fidelity prototype and five for our high-fidelity mockup to see where any possible issues could lie. Through testing, we learned that our original name, hobby, seemed too dismissive of our target users’ talents and that our website could benefit from having more detailed information. Using the learnings, we iterated from our mid-fidelity wireframes to our high-fidelity mockup.
To test our users, we used this usability test script to see if our website was easily navigable with the most important features that we built out.
- You’re a passionate expert and you heard from a friend that they were using a new platform to springboard their new class off the ground. You decide to check it out. Make a new profile as an instructor.
- New to the area, you want to run a calligraphy class, but don’t know where to hold it. View available venues.
- Success! You found your dream venue, and it’s even dog-friendly! Organize a new class (you’ll be logged in).
- It’s one week from your class, and you want to get a proper headcount to help prepare. View the number of attendees for your class.
- You’ve been running these classes regularly for the last few months, and you’ve been noticing some new faces. View an attendee’s profile.
- Your newest class filled up to capacity, and you decided to buy rulers for the beginners. Add it to your supply list.
All users were able to complete all six tasks in the first round with the overall agreement that they were unsure if the tasks were completed correctly. Additionally, many users thought the home page looked like a blog and that the page looked busy.
From there, we went back to the drawing board for our high-fidelity mockup, which was our mid-fidelity wireframes with colors, branding, and imagery folded into the mix, as seen above, and we tested this version with a new set of users.
The number of direct completions increased from the first round, but the time to completion also increased; we believe this was caused by the addition of color and imagery to the screens, creating more elements for the user to scan as they were going through the tasks.
Clickable high-fidelity mockup here.
Looking Ahead
For future iterations, we would add the following:
- Instructor profiles with the ability to add credentials and portfolios so their students can be assured that they’re learning from someone who knows what they’re doing
- Instructor networking capabilities within our platform for potential inter-instructor collaboration
- A more robust brand up-front, such as creating social media accounts to further highlight our instructors as well as our mission statement
- Ticketing management and sales, as this was a pain point that was mentioned across the board with our interviewees
- An overview on the instructor’s dashboard to track their workshops and how much money the instructors made over time
- Payment options for the instructors
Of course, to do all of this, we would also like to conduct an additional round of user interviews to understand the point of view of users who may not have run workshops in the past, but want to.
