Skillsforte: Designing a Digital Skills Learning app for Millennials

Contributions: Product Design, Brand Design, Marketing Design, Product Strategy, Interaction Design.
Duration: Sept 2019 — Nov 2019
Collaborators: Temitope Afolabi (Flutter Developer), Nsugwa James (Full Stack Developer)

Overview

Skillsforte is an Edtech platform aiming to make in-demand skills accessible to youths as well as provide mentorship through one-on-one interactions with mentors in their field of study. Skillsforte makes it easier for African youths to learn in-demand skills when they need them, and most importantly, help them move forward in their careers.

According to the NBS(National Bureau of Statistics), the unemployment rate in Nigeria is 17.69%, South Africa, Namibia, and Nigeria have a population of unemployed young people at a rate of over 30%.

Employment opportunities are scarce among people without in-demand skills, and the opportunities to learn these skills are much more slimmer. However, more access to digital infrastructures, technological & digital skills as well as the right education and support, can help repel this quagmire.

Problem Statement

African youths have little or no access to in-demand skills as they aren’t taught in conventional schools. A lot of graduates and even those without a university degree are unemployed or barely employed. Many graduates lack employable skills and employers do not find them employable, even though they have a degree.

Due to the inaccessibility of these skills which is due to a number of reasons, a lot of people find it hard to learn and equip theirselves with the necessary knowledge. Skillsforte is aiming to bridge the gap between African youths and unemployment by making accessible for them, career-focused and in-demand skills to make them sought after and employable.

Research

Considering young people are the demographic most affected by the unemployment situation in Africa, participants of my research were largely youths. After deploying forms to get feedback, I got a total of 95 responses from people between the ages of 19–35. The biggest objective of my research was finding commonalities and pain points among my research participants. Some findings admitted by the participants were; lack of accessible mentorship or guidance when seeking digital education, a drain of motivation, and too many distractions involved with learning virtually. I sought to find a solution to these problems by establishing features in the Skillsforte product that can resolve these challenges.

More so, during my research, I sought to experience similar edtech platforms to see if there were gaps or opportunities to improve the experience or find alterations that I could use to make Skillsforte a better product.

User Persona

Upon understanding the problems I was trying to solve, I sought out to define the ideal users of the product, the demographic most affected by these problems. This would help in iterating out the solutions I was so keen to provide better. Identified one key persona.

Ideation

With the pain points defined, I gave prioritization to implementing the solutions that would alleviate these pain points with my persona in mind. I gave priority to creating a study-friendly user flow and interface. I gave precedence to create a user flow that’s very user-friendly for studying.

User Flow

I created a user flow to help organize students’ progress, as well as provide navigation that wouldn’t be frustrating or intimidating to students. In summary, the goal was to create a flow on the product that would showcase relevant data to users with ease.

Wireframes

After I had established all the user flows, I had gotten enough insight into crafting out the relevant solutions as well as the product wireframes.

Usability Testing & Iterations

For the usability testing exercise we built a low-fidelity interactive prototype, and had 10 people to test it. low-fidelity prototypes allow us to quickly respond to users’ feedback and iterate accordingly.

Each user was tasked with the following exercise;

• Sign up
• Select and pay for a preferred course
• View selected course(s)
• Watch video lesson
• Chat with a mentor
• Connect with peers and start a chat in the lounge

What we learned;

• A larger percentage of the testers, do not understand the swipe to read feature. Although the cards where decked on each other, user experienced difficulty in swiping to access the next card as there was no hint for swipe directions.
• Users complained on inability to see lesson progress.
• Some testers want to get reminded after a certain time of inactivity during the cause of their learning.
• A tester asked to be able to connect with other learners, irrespective of the course they are taking.
• Users wanted to know, if they can switch to another course, while being enrolled in a course.

Iterations

Based on the feedback and observations from the testers, I made iterations to enable better navigation and ultimately improve the user experience on the app, some of the iterations I worked on were swiping through lesson cards, including progress bar for each lesson and enabling reminder notifications. The updates were reflected in the high-fidelity screens

Other feedbacks I couldn’t incorporate at the moment would be done in the next iteration

Solutions

With data obtained from the user research, as well as feedbacks from testers, I came up with the following solutions;

Gamification of studying for the purpose of motivation.

Users get badges upon completion of milestones in their courses, which are similar to rewards acquired as a result of learning evaluation through quizzes. This also encourages students and motivate them to keep learning. This solution solves Adewale’s frustration of keeping motivated throughout the course of learning.

In-app mentorship.

Once a learner enrolls for a course, they are automatically paired with a mentor who is a professional in their field of study. They can chat the mentor up for help at any point in their learning journey to gain clarity on a particular topic in the course or ask general questions. This solution further emphasizes the value proposition of Skillsforte, which is to match ambitious mentees with mentors who are professionals in their chosen fields, and make learning easier through one-on-one interaction.

Immersive classroom experience through study lounge

The study lounge provides an efficient way to connect with fellow learners of the same course and receive support as well as guidance from knowledgeable mentors on the subject matter.

Students feel more connected to their program when they can easily and consistently read topical conversations, and send and respond to relevant messages which also enables the formation of a fully-immersive classroom experience.

Bite-sized Learning through cards

This feature allows users to easily swipe cards containing small chunks of content designed majorly to make reading natural and pleasant. Once a learner begins a lesson, they can easily swipe through learning cards instead of scrolling through large portion of contents. They can also see the progress of their lessons through the progress bar.

Save to read later

Learners can bookmark learning cards which will be available to them even without internet connection and can be accessible under the bookmarks section. This enables learners learn at their own pace,and also learn anywhere, anytime easily without internet limitations.

Timed Reminder

During on boarding process, learners can schedule learning time reminders and get notifications when it’s time to learn to build a consistent learning habit. They can also get reminders if they haven’t been on the app for sometime.

Conclusion

This project however was an important one for me and an eye-opener. I’m intrigued to have worked on it as it availed me a lot of understanding and cleared my speculations on certain aspects of EdTech solutions. I am definitely looking forward to wide acceptance by the larger population of users as this project was built tailored to specifications and to solve problems of millennial learners.