Frosh-UX Case Study
At the beginning of new batch for a course, educators are faced with the challenge of remembering names of a large number of new students.
Thus, creating a product that helps them in remembering the names with faces of all students quickly, accurately, and without any need for help will result in:
- Better productivity
- More interactive sessions
- Quality education
- New revenue stream for the business
Defining the audience
Educators is a very broad audience to create a solution for thus I decided to divide them into subcategories such as:
- School Teachers
- University Professors
- Online educators
- Coaches/Tutors
I decided to narrow it down even further to create a useful product focussed on a few rather than a useless product trying to fit all.
I chose the two broadest sub-categories — School Teachers and College Professors so that the product can have a greater impact.
User Needs
Ideally, I would have gone into the field and did some user research by asking open-ended questions to school teachers and college professors to have a better understanding of their needs and goals but considering COVID -19 situation, I decided to stay indoors and come up with some user needs and goals by trying to put myself in user’s shoes.
Below are some needs and goals that I could come up with:
- As an educator, I want to learn and remember the names of students so that I can interact with every student in a better way.
- As an educator, I want to remember names quickly so that my workflow is smooth and I don’t feel stuck while creating documents.
- As an educator, I want to stop mixing up student names so that I feel less frustrated.
A Fictional User aka Persona
Based on the above-defined audience and user needs, I created the following user persona by doing some online research which stated the following:
- The age range for teachers around the world lie between 20 to 50 and the overall average age is 43 years
- Almost 67% of teachers in the world are female.
I also assumed that teachers have little knowledge of how to interact with technology.
Coming up with Ideas
To come up with a solution I took the following points into consideration while keeping our audience as the focus:
- Users need to keep on moving from one class to another.
- Based on my assumption, users are a little tech-friendly.
Thus, a digital product such as a mobile application would be a great fit as users will be able to use it when and where they need it. As our users are a little tech-friendly, a mobile application won’t be a hurdle as we use apps of some kind or the other on a daily basis.
From a business perspective as well, I believe that this idea is feasible as it will have a large impact, considering the number of teachers around the world and require medium effort as teaching apps like Duolingo, Babbel, Lingvist already exist, thus reinventing the wheel is not required.
Storyboarding — How our product fits in user’s life
Design
To start off with the designing process I needed to decide on which features should be made to provide maximum value with the least amount of effort.
I decided to create just three features for three major needs.
For the Learning Modules feature, I needed to decide on what modules should I create to make it intuitive for users to learn. To make this happen, I chose to use the kindergarten approach: Recognizing, Hearing, Speaking, and Spelling.
Once I was clear on this, I started designing some initial sketches using pen and paper to convert all my ideas into something tangible before they slip out of my mind. When my sketches seemed good enough, I created digital wireframes which I’ll be using to create a user flow.
After converting my sketches into a digital format I started creating user flow. While I was creating user flow, I added few screens that I found were missing to support the user through their journey while using this app.
When I was able to get a good understanding of user flow, I proceeded to Figma to develop prototype for this app. I tried to keep design very minimal to avoid ambiguousness and promote understandability.
Measuring Success
To measure the success of this app, I would keep an eye on the following parameters:
- Number of Downloads
- Number of uninstalls
- Rating on Play Store / App Store
My Learnings
- Having a design system in place before proceeding with creating screens for the prototype as I had to go back and forth multiple times to get the desired look is a must.
- Keeping some kind of record of initial designs to show what iterations I took and why would be beneficial.
Well! That’s a wrap.
This is my first case study for my first ever design project thus, I would love to receive feedback on this in the comments section. Also, you can reach out to me on Twitter or Linkedin.
Thanks for reading!
