Squad Ed is a new e-learning platform that bridges online learning and affordable education. By reuniting learning with online education you can learn anything, anywhere at your own pace. What makes Squad Ed unique is the one on one mentor sessions with accredited instructors who will push you to sharpen career ready skills and apply them to real work environments.
Talking to Users
In order to understand our target users a bit more, we spoke with college students about cost of educational resources they currently utilize or have utilized in the past. We learned about 53% of recent graduates are unemployed. The average amount of student debt upon college graduation is over $25,000. Currently educational resources are overpriced and not affordable by the average college student.
Collecting Insights
To get an even deeper understanding of our users we distributed an online survey, created a user testing plan and conducted five one on one user interviews. We synthesized user key insights into categories then created an affinity diagram to translate our users insights into legible qualitative data.
Most of our feedback consisted of affordability, accessibility and live support. This brought up the idea of making Squad Ed a more unique experience by incorporating one on one live mentor guidance. With an accessible live mentor users would feel more confident in pursuing the courses they need through Squad Ed.
Competitors
We reviewed our competitors and discovered a lack in live support, mentor guidance, and affordability. Although our competitors are transitioning in recruiting more certified instructors most of the courses taught are by professionals who currently work in their field of study.
The Making of Squad Ed
From the data we collected, we created an ideal user flow as how we imagined our website to pan out and what our desired user experience would entail.
It later developed into a storyboard, which captured the user’s journey and emotional results with each page they interacted with. From here we could decide what features were needed to make Squad Ed a unique experience. We wanted to create a seamless experience for our target users by emphasizing on simplicity but keeping a balance between affordability and accessibility, as both were appreciated.
The initial sketches of Squad Ed focused on searching for courses and filtering them into categories. However, after user-testing the prototype with a handful of people, it was apparent that the purpose of the website was losing its main focus: populating relevant courses and cost of subscriptions.
Big Idea Prioritization
After incorporating these changes into our mid fidelity prototype it was back to testing for my team. I facilitated in person user testing where we conducted six user testing sessions to uncover new problems and discover opportunities. Then we synthesized our user data into a prioritization map, highlighted our users key insights and discovered most of our users had problems with clarity of Squad Eds courses and curriculum.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
Based on all of our findings shown above, we narrowed our focus into 4 areas for potential improvement of our original prototype:
- Improve course descriptions
- Improve course topics
- Improve course curriculum
- Improve cta buttons for subscribers
Improve course descriptions
We iterated course descriptions with snippet summaries to best explain what users will learn from the courses.
Improve course topics
When users searched for course topics the populated results weren't relevant to searched topic. We improved users search results by changing the populated results to courses that match or are similar.
Improve course curriculum
Users wanted more information on the course curriculum so we added the planned experiences students will learn along with past users experiences by incorporating a reviews section.
Improve cta buttons
We needed to bridge the gap between e-learning and subscribers as this was important in retaining users. We added affordances by including a start your free trial button.
High Fidelity
After conducting more user testing we transitioned into researching intuitive UI to display course information in a more visual way for it to be better digested and appealing. We utilized minimalism in our design with colors that kept users focused and positive when navigating through Squad Ed. To further validate our high-fi visual style guide we conducted A/B testing to which users enjoyed the A testing prototype as seen below.
Challenges and Next Steps
One of our main challenges was the lack of time that we had day to day, we were stretched thin! With this challenge, we often had to reiterate our designs in order to be achievable within time and technical constraints, while still providing more value to our users. Our goal was to provide a unique and seamless educational experience to our users however, there are still improvements that can be made. Our next steps would be to focus on our opportunities by keeping Squad Ed an affordable and transformative e-learning platform.
