The Bold Inventor's Studio
Project Overview
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, educators found themselves quickly transitioning to online teaching models. The Bold Inventor's Studio is a platform meant to help children build a love for STEM via online learning.
Goal
The goal of this project is to build a virtual, collaborative and educational STEM program that enables effective, interactive, and efficient delivery of the home-based-learning model for children K-12.
My Role
I worked as a solo UX designer throughout the 5 month project life cycle. During this project I gathered client requirements, developed solutions, performed validation, and optimized user experience.
Design Process
In order to develop a cohesive and realistic design, the five-stage Design Thinking model was utilized: Emphasize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Step 1: Empathize
To gain an empathetic understanding of the problems and understand users' motivations and experiences, the founder of the company was interviewed. This allowed a better understanding of the user's goals. Ideally, this process would have been repeated with individual interviews, a cross-functional panel including the company founder, and users such as students and parents.
Step 2: Define
During this phase, the responses obtained from the interview from the empathize phase were put together. The answers helped define the core problems and questions that guided the design process.
Problem Statement
The STEM program was originally taught in-person. With the pandemic causing stay-at-home orders, children were not allowed to meet up for their regular lessons. Parents wanted their children to continue the program without the risk of getting sick.
Step 3: Ideate
In this stage personas and a user flow chart were created in Adobe Illustrator based on the feedback received from the interview process. Using personas helps identify exactly what the users need from the product. The main target audience is the parent purchasing the subscription and the child who will be using the platform. The purpose of the user flow chart was to be able to show the client exactly how the website would flow and how users would navigate different sections.
Step 4: Prototype
During this phase, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes were designed in Figma to solve the problems discussed in the previous stages. Prototypes were sent to the client to maximize the clarity of deliverables and ultimately customer satisfaction.
Step 5: Testing
This project did not involve user tests. If user based testing was an option, a usability test would have been conducted with the targeted users being parents and children using the learning platform.
The key user flows of interest in this project were profile registration, purchasing lesson/ subscription(s), and accessing content.
A brief user survey would have been conducted to collect free-form user responses on key usability features. Questions would be asked based on the following:
(A) registering a user profile
(B) purchasing a lesson/subscription
(C) accessing your required content
Responses would provide detailed insight on user experience and potential task failures.
The time to complete the registration user flow would be measured. This time would be compared to an estimate to ensure this user flow did not contain a significant amount of unexpected friction. This data would be used to assess future design changes' impact on time to register.
Purchasing a lesson/subscription, would be measured through the conversion rate. This rate is a measure of the number of users who purchase a lesson/subscription divided by the total number of users who visit the site. The conversion rate of the first test would be used as a starting point for comparison for future iterations success.
An automated one-question survey would be given to a random sample of participants that asks if they were able to access the content. Users would respond with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Data would be converted into a success rate and compared to the industry's standard. The data collected would help to understand if users are able to achieve the main goal of the website.
The data collected in the steps detailed above would then be summarized. These findings would be used to help evaluate proposed design changes' impact on key metrics.
