Descomplica
From planning to studying
Context
Descomplica is an edtech that provides students with subject and course materials. It provides students with pre-recorded and live classes, online monitoring for college entrance exam tests, undergrad and postgrad courses.
My Role
As senior product designer of learning experience for undergrads, my main responsibility is to tighten the gap between the needs of tech, business and students. In order to accomplish that my tasks are analyzing user’s metrics; plan, moderate and synthesize user researches; conduct benchmark and competitive analysis; design low to high fidelity prototypes with solid documentation to the dev team.
The Opportunity
This was my very first project at Descomplica and I felt the lack of background information about our audience and even of our business. So I pitched a CSD workshop for our kickoff, that way we could raise what the people involved in the project know about the subject, level the knowledge among the team members and create an action plan for your discovery phase. Bonus points for creating an environment here the developers felt their voices been heard so early on the process 😉
Register of our very first CSD workshop
We left the first meeting with lots of assumptions and doubts to be addressed. So In order to make sense of the topics I clustered them forming an affinity diagram. It helped me to have a clear vision about what to do next: interviews.
Affinity diagram based on the CSD workshop findings.
Coming to an interview with a set of doubts helped a lot! I talked to many stakeholders about 1) the questions left unanswered on our first meeting; 2) how, in their perception, the study plan would affect our business. That helped me to broaden my understanding of what was their expectations about the subject Study plan.
The only part left to investigate was the students themselves. The majority of our doubts could be addressed in a qualitative manner and, apart from that, we were talking a brand new feature with no previous data, so we decided for an exploratory interview. Helped by our product manager, I structured our research plan while he was responsible for inviting students for the interview.
During 4 days we talked with 5 students to get a better understanding of what were their studying habits: what tools they use, how or if they organize their studies at all, and all the remaining questions left from our CSD.
Here’s what we learned from our discovery
Insights
Stakeholders
– Our solution must take into account college's multiple intakes;
– Our home screen is confusing for students. They’re not sure about how our “keep studying” section actually works. That was confirmed with the interviews.
Students
– They does not associate their effort in classes per day, but hours per day instead;
– Undergrads doesn’t always have a fixed period to their studying activities. By the fact they share attention with other tasks and/or interests, sometimes they have a need to reorganize their studying plans;
– Many students still leans over analogical tools when the subject is planning and organization.
Interviewing students
The Solution
In possession of all those fresh insights, it was time to star thinking of how to solve the problem at hand. So I pitched a co-creation workshop to our team: a remote session of crazy eights.
None of them had experience, So I setted up a brief explanation what is the dynamic and how we would do it at Miro.
The first remote crazy eights I hosted
A couple of dozen sketches and dotting votes later, we came up with with a couple of great ideas which I synthesize later on a pen and paper wireframe.
We presented those wireframes to the engineering team and a few stakeholders in order to receive the first round of feedbacks.
Wireframes based on our co-creative session
From there we evolved those wireframes into a high-fidelity prototype and delivered a documented hand-off
The setup of study plan prototype
Learnings & Outcomes
Unfortunately we didn’t had the time to user test our solutions by the time that the engineering team needed to start working on this feature. And now looking back I see where we could have take less time so we could be able to test before shipping the solution.
Thank you for your time
