Athena

This project is currently under NDA. The client cannot be explicitly named therefore “Athena” is used as a code name.

Challenge: To eliminate user’s everyday challenges and moments of friction that stand in the way of completing a professional certificate on an online learning platform.

Solution: Athena is designed for on-the-go learning by curating content based on the indicated amount of time learners have to study that day. Additionally, Athena uses short videos and gamification to keep learners engaged and motivated to continue their courses.

Project Length: Jan - Mar 2023

Course: Human Centered UI/UX Design

Contributions: User research (prep and interviews), competitive product analysis, UI design, presentations

Team Members: Sherry (Yangmiao) Xu, Emerson Fister, Ada Michaels-Shapiro

design principles
Indicate time available
Choose study plan
Curated Content
Celebrate learning
Gamification
Reward learning
Progress Tracking
Value Adding
Value Adding for Client

Process

Understanding the Landscape

The first step for us was getting a better understanding of what learners' current options are in terms of online learning. For this, the team did secondary research on a variety of popular online learning platforms such as Skillshare, Masterclass, and Khan Academy as well platforms targeted to specific groups of learners such as Axonify which is marketed towards “frontline” employees.

While conducting this research, we were looking for:

What particular features were available to learners? What makes it different from other platforms?
Who is the target audience?
What is the current journey like for learners wanting to sign up and/or subscribe to that platform? What opportunities are there to improve that process?
Taking notes on general aesthetics and micro-interactions. What keeps learners engaged and willing to come back to the platform?

Understanding the Journey

To understand the journey from a learner's perspective, each member of the team signed up for accounts on our clients learning platform. We all went through the onboarding process and the first couple of classes of a course (using a free trial). During our competitive analysis phase, we were able to compare this onboarding experience to what the Athena (our client’s platform) experience was.

At this point our team was also preparing for our first round of interviews with 7 participants who had all completed a course or were in the middle of completing a course at the time of the interview. From these interviews, we wanted to understand:

What exactly are the moments of friction/ challenges that stand in the way of completing the course for a user?
Do the concepts of everyday challenges and moments of friction differ for users and in what ways?
What motivates learners to complete a task that requires effort, time, technology, mental and physical energy?
What emotions come to users’ mind when thinking about completing a course online?

In this round of interviews, we had learners co-create a journey map to document the steps they took after signing up for a class. In Particular, we were looking to capture what emotions they felt as they were completing the course, what difficulties they faced along the way that would prohibit completing the course and how their motivations changed over time. Since these interviews were conducted virtually and were only about 30 minutes long, we created a simplified version of a journey map.

After interviews, we synthesized our findings and came out with several insights including:

Learners want to be confident in finishing a course

We found that many learners didn’t tell anyone, including family members, that they were enrolled in a course just in case they didn’t finish it. Many of the anxieties stemmed from worrying about class difficulty and the ability to fit the class into their busy schedules.

Time is precious and broken into pieces

This is where we discovered that learners manage to fit learning into small chunks of time they have available throughout the day such as before work or during a lunch break. Many learners are looking to change careers and are still working full time jobs and in some cases working multiple jobs at once. Being able to fit learning into small chunks of time throughout the day is crucial.

Learners want sufficient and high quality support

The current platform doesn’t provide sufficient resources to learners when they have difficulty understanding material meaning that learners lose motivation when they feel like they cannot continue the course.

We then took these insights to inform our design principles and narrowed down the opportunities we felt we were capable of designing for considering our limited time on the project and what learners seemed to be the most passionate about.

Prototyping & Testing:

For our next round of interviews we created lo-fi prototypes. These prototypes included the overall user experience from signing up for the app to completing a lesson. We then provided several A/B testing options for different features.

In this testing session we wanted to understand:

How did learners feel about completing a lesson on a mobile device compared to a desktop version?
Would learners look forward to coming back to the platform to complete another lesson? What could we include to make this true?
Was the experience compatible with how the learner preferred to learn new information? How can we best cater to different learning styles?
Since we were designing for learners who felt they had small amounts of time in their day to complete a lesson, was this format of learning compatible with learners busy schedules?

What I learned:

Micro-interactions can have a huge impact - there are small details in the final UX design that were driven by what learners expressed they wanted to feel when using this service. It’s the small details that count.

Teamwork makes the dream work- in this project, we wanted to take every opportunity we could to co-design alongside our users in the interviews we conducted. We wanted our final design to be learner-centered by incorporating the tools and features learners wanted to see. By doing this we were not only raising the value of this concept to the user but to our client.

Acknowledgements:

I’d like to thank our instructors: Susan Curtis, Tom Quish, Jesse Wilbur for organizing the class that allowed us to complete so much in such a short time

I’d like to thank our client partners for taking the time to give us such insightful feedback and for considering our ideas
Last but not least, I’d like to thank my teammates for all their hard work (listed at the top). It was a wonderful experience and you’re all superstars <3

user journey for deciding to take an online course for professional development

Simplified journey map used for interview stimuli

Board summarizing themes and insights across interviews and secondary research

Design principles for Athena based off our first round of research

From the interviews, we learned that:

Adults like games too - we received positive feedback on being able to play different games to both learn and review concepts. Gamification was seen as a way to keep learning fun, meaning learners would look forward to completing lessons.
Time blocking was a method to keep yourself accountable - many of the learners felt that being able to block out time whether in the app itself or in an external calendar was a method to keep themselves accountable and to follow through with completing a lesson
Learners want to be rewarded - whether it’s for completing a lesson or getting a new high score in a game, learners felt that they would be more motivated to continue learning if they could both see and use their accomplishments to gain rewards within the platform

Competitor Analysis board looking at a variety of online learning platforms