Seneca

Back to school 🎒

Seneca is a design challenge I did for an EdTech company. They offer online learning courses, aligned with school curriculum. Their users are high school students preparing for national exams.

The scope of the challenge was to design a course search function for their guest users.

Process

I had just about a week to complete the design challenge. To do so, I adjusted the design process to better fit my timeframe. Research and Define were combined, forming a single, dynamic process - Understand the problem.

Hitting the books

As I studied the brief, two important questions popped.

Where in the overall user journey does the guest course search flow sit?

What is the desired outcome from the business' perspective?

Understanding this gives valuable context that helps design the function in a way that meets user needs while delivering the desired business outcome.

Getting to know the users

I proceeded with user research to understand better the needs and pain points of students on online learning platforms.

Here is a user profile I created with my findings👇

Why do users drop out during onboarding?

Another angle I took with my research was to understand why users drop out during onboarding or during their very first interactions with a product.

User flow

I looked at the current guest user journey on the course search and mapped these pain points to the different stages to better illustrate what problems users experience and where.

Ideation

With these findings I switched to solution mode. To do this, I like asking HMW questions.

How might we design a course search feature that...

Sketches

Based on these I started sketching some initial ideas with features addressing the user journey issues. Here are some of the sketches.

The Walkie-Talkie

An interactive way to show the user around the solution while getting them to engage with it. Prompts shown one by one.

The Friendly

A solution with a function to ask a friend to choose the course. Makes the experience more social. It also promotes the product.

The Fortune Teller

A gamified solution to selecting a course to increase engagement.

The Basic

A simplified and polished version of the original solution. Added UI elements like the course tier toggle and 'Go' CTAs to improve user experience.

Final design

The final solution was a mix of elements from the different sketches that best addressed the issues in the user experience.

Here is a walk-through of my design decisions 👇

Engaging call-to-action:

• Feels motivating
• Indirectly says 'join your peers - this is a community'
• Communicates the value proposition - Learn faster

Clarifies:

• What the user needs to do
• What they get in return
• The copy used shapes an enticing experience

Use questions in the filters:

• Makes the experience more interactive and clear
• Only essential, high-level questions to keep the process quick and easy but still personalise the course selection

A fun and easy way to get to a course:

• The user doesn't have to choose - the system identifies the best course based on the filters and most popular courses
• Gamification can improve conversions by 8%

Feedback from dropdowns fills in the blank spaces:

• It's more interactive
• Resembles a 'fill-the-blanks' exercise

Used highlighters to:

• Resemble student notes
• Feel familiar to students

Premium is available but deprioritised (for guest users):

• To reduce cognitive load
• Avoid frustration with seeing unavailable courses in the results

Check out the Figma prototype 📝

Limitations & risks

Too little choice

Assumption: A guest user wants to test the product, see if it works for them.

If so, no wide choice is required - the user wants a suitable course to test the solution.

This needs to be validated in user testing.

System feedback

System feedback from dropdown lists shows in the text on the side - may confuse users.

This needs to be validated in user testing.

Longer to build

This solution takes longer to build than a traditional search + filter function.

What's next

Since this solution is very different from the original, I’d say it is high risk and will need to go through usability testing to validate the assumptions I have made, and to test it against the identified risks.

Here's what's next 👇

Validation & measuring success

Validation

In order to validate the design, when user testing I will look for answers to:

• What difficulties do users experience?
• What do they like/dislike about the design?
• What would they change?
• Validate against limitations & risks.

Metrics

Once the solution is live, I will measure:

• Time to complete flow.
• Start-course-rate through the different features.
• Activation rate.

* I will assign goals for each to measure how they contribute to the overall goal of increasing activation rate by 25%.