Adventure Camp: an online learning summer camp
Ironhack Bootcamp Week 3 — Project Week
Time is flying and the Ironhack Bootcamp is already at week 3. Now, it was time for Project Week, which means that our group should decide the schedule for the week and also the UX tools that would be used to solve our client problem. Our final goal was to create an engaging educational online experience for Fun People Inc.
Fun People Inc. is an educational company that offers in-person courses for adults of languages, music, yoga, cooking and first-aid. However, they realized that many people are unable to attend the workshop camp due to time and cost reasons. With that in mind, we should create an online learning platform that would follow the unique Fun People Inc. recipe:
“integrate classes, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff.”
Empathize
Now that we understood the problem, it’s time to start the research and find out some valuable information. Before creating a survey, we ran a CSDi Matrix (certainties, assumptions, doubts and ideas in portuguese). Like in the last week project, this was essential to see the “big picture”.
A little bit of desk research to come up with a competitive analysis. It’s a useful tool to understand what is happening out there and what people expect from our product.
In order to find out more about our user behavior and gather insights, we created a survey that would help us to understand what makes an online educational tool useful.
This is what we found:
- 45% of the users want to have fun while learning
- 45% of the users want have a teacher while studying online
- 51% prefers to have their pace set with deadlines
- 67% prefers to learn alone
We downloaded the information and created an Affinity Map, so we could start to warm up and already imagine some design opportunities.
After reading and thinking about our Affinity Map it was possible to create our User Persona. Joana, a 25 years old nurse that wants to improve her english to move abroad. It’s essential for Joana to learn alone, with guidance, and having fun.
Define
It’s time to synthesize our findings, to visualize our problem statement, and to describe our user needs.
This is our How Might We.
Ideate
Always my favorite part of the project: tackle the problem and come up with as many creative solutions as possible.
With our How Might We in mind and remembering our client brief, we went for a classical round of brainstorming.
And it was exactly in this moment that our group had a problem. We had so many ideas, that would fit in different kinds of products, that it was almost impossible to visualize our concept even after the voting session.
It was when MoSCoW showed up and saved the day.
It was my first time with this tool. Basically, is a prioritization method, that helps to make it clear what is a Must Have, a Should Have, a Could Have, and a Won’t Have.
This is ours Must Have:
- The student must have a personal mission
- The student must be able to communicate with other online students
- We will represent a real camp through a board game
This is ours Should and Could that later on were in our final concept:
- The student should be able to walk around in different areas of the game
- The game should present levels of achievements
- The game could understand the level of knowledge of each student
Now, it was much easier to build our concept!
The Adventure Camp
Our app is a board game that simulates a real learning summer camp.
It’s a place where you can move around, choose your favorite subject to study, improve your skills in a fun and easy way, just like playing a game. You are also able to communicate with other students and build your network.
Right after coming with the first concept, we tested and figured out that people were having trouble to understand the definition of the sections “Personal” and “Community”. Also, they were sure that the camp was for kids.
So we renamed the sections for “Personal Training” and “Community Interactions”. We also changed our logo and added a slogan that would make it clear that the camp is for adults.
Prototype and Test
With our concept already built, our group decided to create a basic user flow for Joana, our user persona, to follow. With the flow in mind, each one of us did a fast sketch on Figma. We combined the best features of each sketch and finish our Low-Fi.
After testing on Useberry, we realized that we were giving to many tasks. We changed a few things, decided to focus on one major task and moved to the Mid-Fi.
Below you can see Joana completing her first english task:
In the last part of the prototype, we added a sneaky peaky of our next steps. We would really like to improve the sense of community in our game :) So we created a chat room, where you can talk with others students and check their profile.
Takeaways
- Believe in the process
- Trust in MoSCoW
- There is nothing more steady than a solid concept
- On prototype testing, test one task at a time
Thanks for reading :)
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
