UX research and concept of a (post-pandemic) e-learning startup
We partnered with Media Engine to design the User Experience of a new online learning platform, a marketplace of synchronous courses for kids. The client, an e-learning startup with experience in the development of digital educational products and services, asked us to translate the users’ needs and expectations into a service for the Italian market, which would respond to the change of digital behaviors in education generated by the pandemic.
In Italy, the education system is predominantly public and coordinated nationally. Schools have relative autonomy to define curricula and organize extra-curricular activities locally. Before the pandemic, most schools relied exclusively on in-person school activities, in classrooms often equipped with interactive whiteboards. In 2020 the pandemic has forced schools to close for long periods of time and led to an abrupt transition to remote education, which disrupted educators’ programs and family routines.
Within this context, our client launched an online learning platform to provide extra-curricular activities to students aged 6 to 16 (for which education in Italy is compulsory).
Work Model
We collaborated with the client during a kick-off workshop to learn about their vision for the platform, and found that the fundamental driver for the project is the promotion of proactive learning.
The workshop was designed to allow the conversation to flow from a strategic vision, towards goals and concerns about the process and technical aspects. The workshop was a crucial moment to onboard the client as an active player during user research and journey mapping as a path to the user stories.
We established a transparent relationship based on mutual trust. Small facilitation details and cultural metaphors contributed to this. For example, we called an ideation session idee sospese to ‘suspend’ pre-existing ideas before validation. The name of the activity was inspired by the generous and caring concept of caffè sospeso, which is traditional from Naples and consists of a cup of coffee anonymously paid for in advance in cafés.
The first activity of the workshop was the Golden Circle, which confronted the client with the questions of why and how to create this platform and what it should do and unveiled fundamental aspects of the business strategy. We learned about their vision of a service offer based on innovative content and teaching formats, with a strong focus on digital skills as a way to compensate for the old and rigid public school programs. They believed this would also address the lack of stimuli and opportunities to explore personal interests, while leveraging on the potential of digital tools to bridge the geographical divide.
“The world is changing, there are many new skills that our kids should learn.” (startup founder, mother of three young kids)
Being an online marketplace, the business success of the platform relies on the ability to attract a rich database of contents (provided by teachers) in order to be interesting as a service for users (students) and customers (parents).
The client’s knowledge of digital platforms and online education was particularly relevant to highlight the risks connected to child online safety and data privacy, but also to anticipate the motivational factors that would influence the educators’ experience and willingness to use the platform.
Research process and key findings
After learning about the business perspective during the workshop, we did one-to-one interviews with each member of the business team to further understand the client requirements. In parallel, we performed online research with similar platforms and relevant benchmarks and ethnographic research to map the user experience using the client’s reference platform.
From this starting point, we developed a research strategy with the goal of learning about the Italian context from the perspective of users, which would allow us to understand where we are at and what are the signals pointing in the direction of the emerging near future. This consisted of one-to-one interviews with students, parents, educators and one school director — our goal was to learn about their interests in life and daily routines, as well as their experiences with e-learning platforms and remote schooling and how their lives have changed with the pandemic.
“I usually just type on YouTube the things I am interested in.” (student, 16 years old)
As always, listening to individual stories is incredibly insightful and this time was no different. In this sensitive moment of the pandemic, we interviewed teachers and students that have recently gone back to school for in-person activities, only to find a completely new learning and teaching experience: many restrictions and safety procedures, digital tools embedded in their daily tasks and relational struggles connected to the long periods of mediated interaction.
The key insights of the research are:
- Digital transformation: Online learning is not a substitute for in-person learning, it instead requires specific content formats, methodologies, teaching strategies, other than devices and connectivity.
- Technological maturity: Families, educators and schools are more prepared than ever to use and interact with online learning and digital educational products, and they are also very aware of the potential of technology to enhance the learning and teaching experience.
- Focused activities: Students are interested in deepening their knowledge of specific subjects rather than having a general overview of an entire discipline. They are driven by the direct application of new skills and they are interested in learning from experts and professionals, rather than from teachers.
- Social media drive: Students follow influencers and are attracted by engaging multimedia content which they find thanks to their social media activity.
- Social connection: Social interaction and the sharing of experiences with friends and colleagues is a key motivation for young people. Remote learning transferred most interactions to the online space, which now remains and coexists with the real-time less controlled interactions in physical environments.
- Traditional school painpoints: Traditional school programs are rigid and often fail to meet the needs of students in terms of personal development and exploration of individual interests. Moreover, schools leave students with a great part of the afternoon free for extracurricular activities, generating the need for parents to provide their children with alternative activities, which should address both the students’ interests and the parents’ quality criteria.
- Teachers' adaptation and motivation: Teachers feel disconnected from the community and often do not know where to start and how to plan their online teaching activities, finding it hard to objectively differentiate in-person and remote strategies and to gain sufficient understanding of the resources available and possibilities given by the online.
From insights to the design of experiences
After collecting and synthesising the research data in five personas — student, parent, teacher, education service provider and platform business owner — we mapped their future state user journeys to define their experience before, during and after using the new platform. The journey maps reflect the business requirements and benchmarking research while addressing the needs, frustrations, and goals of the personas.
The experience guidelines that have informed the design are:
- It should be possible to share content (between parent and student and among friends) to encourage quick and easy communication and to leverage the influence of friends.
- The landing page should speak to parents, while students should instead be able to directly access specific content and activities within the platform from external links or from their friends.
- The tone of voice should be informal when speaking to students, especially in pages dedicated to specific courses/activities, and avoid words connected to school and education, as the last thing they want to do after school is school-related activities.
- At the same time, parents need to be reassured that content is safe, certified, and contributes to their kids’ development.
- The platform should put teachers at the center of the experience and give great focus on guiding them through the onboarding process and curation of content.
- Furthermore, teachers should have access to training resources and networking opportunities that are missing from their present experience and contribute to enhancing the quality of their work and thus of the platform contents.
These guidelines were translated into hundreds of actionable User Stories for each subphase of the journey maps. We also specified, for each journey, a set of user stories from the point of view of the business owners, which should feed the platform management dashboard.
This allowed us to detail the platform UX requirements from the point of view of each persona and in a way that would then be clear and objective for the UI design and development teams. User stories provide the necessary granularity to implementation teams, and they are fundamental to evaluate the impact of each feature, allowing the business to prioritize and support decision-making based on precise cost and benefit estimations.
The implementation of the user stories started with the design of low-fi wireframes and flow diagrams. Through confrontation with the client, we iterated and refined the design and ended up with a functional wireframe mockup that reflected the business requirements and the user needs.
Besides the actual platform UX, a great focus should be placed on the strategic design of marketing initiatives aimed at reaching parents, students, and teachers through social media platforms and engaging them with targeted content.
Reflections and lessons learned
- The recruitment of users for research activities uncovered the ambiguity of the concept of “e-learning platform”, which many parents often misunderstood as the software that supports and enables remote learning such as video call software and file-sharing apps.
- The ongoing pandemic is a transitional moment in terms of education: ‘before the pandemic’ is already old and ‘after the pandemic’ is still uncertain. Our research captured the current situation with an intrinsic sense of change.
- Zoom fatigue bias: collected information and observations may have been inflated by recent negative experiences of fully online learning periods. Students, teachers and parents feel tired of remote interactions and permanent connectivity and may instinctively refuse to acknowledge the benefits of learning and teaching from home.
