Introduction
Since late 2015, the Company had successfully started an Advocate Programme consisting of volunteer teachers who apply and advocate the use of our product in teaching and learning. Our network of Advocates has been a critical factor in influencing adoption of our products in Malaysian schools (ground-up). And the Company has been supplementing Advocate teachers with learning materials through various channels within product's platform to equip other teachers with knowledge of the product and its application. Now, with the strategy of PdPcB, the project aim towards strengthening Company’s programmes to strive for the pursuit of 21st century education.
There were two separate projects - one aiming to create the next phase of Advocate Programme while the other aiming towards Professional Development of the teachers. Each had separate and specific business needs but then began to converge, when we went through Design Thinking process, as a single project due to their overlapping user needs and business requirements.
Challenge
The Company didn't have any clear visibility on onground programme's performance which posed a challenge in measuring effectiveness and impact of the products too. The accessibility to those programmes were also reported to be very poor as lesser number of participants were being reported to have been turning up. The number of events being conducted had no precise data. The participants received certificates of appreciation manually through mail within 2 days to 1 month of the event leaving some not so pleased. It was a time-consuming and redundant work performed by single individual weekly basis, from several years.
Scope
Duration: 7 weeks
Role: I was the sole Designer on an agile team comprising of 2 developers, 8 ground consultants, a product owner, a scrum master, and a quality engineer. I was responsible for determining the overall design direction of the project, while leading and facilitating the rest of the team through Design Thinking process. I also injected Lean methodologies into our solution design process followed by implementation of Agile UX in the development cycle.
Tools: Paper, Pencil, Marker pens, Whiteboard, Post-its, Dot Stickers, Sketch App, MarvelApp
Deliverables: High Fidelity Interactive Prototype
Activities performed
Stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, telephonic user interviews, competitive and comparative analysis, focus groups, affinity mapping, solution sketches, dot voting, storyboarding, user journey map, success metrics, story mapping, information architecture, rapid prototyping, wireframing, brand identity design, usability testing and product requirement document.
Solution Overview
A solution platform that empowers teachers to grow professionally by:
1. Allowing them easy access to various type of learning opportunities that they can participate
2. Enabling them to plan and/or publish their activities
3. Rewarding and recognising them for participating in activities
Early Designs
Challenges faced During early stages
During one of the early Design Sprints, there was an adhoc request from ground team to provide a solution for quick distribution of certificates to the participants. The person in charge of the certificate generation had to fill in the position of another employee who had recently moved out so, that added an extra load of work for him. They were looking for someone to take on the task or automating the process of certificate generation using some plugin or tool.
I realised this might fork the design direction as well as affect our deliverable timeline but I had to understand the real issue so, one day brought in the person who used to handle the certificate generation process for one-to-one chat. While he walked me through the flow I started drawing it on a whiteboard and theming them. I tried to understand his entire end-to-end workflow and after half-an-hour of discussion I realised the person was going through lot of mental burden and had to juggle lot of things. Although he used a chrome plugin for automation, still he had a backlog of 10,000 certificates to be generated and every 100 certificates took him almost half-a-day to generate if he simply sits staring at the screen whole day, and if were juggling other works that would probably take him lot longer.
I found a solution but we were not ready to implement that yet. There was a bigger challenge in front. It was to handle the biases of those in the team and to help in developing their mindset to see deeper problems before jumping into a solution. Most in the team were either jumping into a random solution or were leading the users to conclusion that they thought was true. This affected our initial hypothesis as well as decisions. Due to that I had to go through lot of back-n-forth with the team during decision making. I had to conduct short knowledge-sharing sessions as well as provide in-time feedbacks during discussions. The key challenge for me was to make the team aware about Design Thinking process and lead them through convergent and divergent thinking methods before arriving at a solution.
Once we had decided to build the mobile app we faced other challenges like general app response time was high and for team it was not a concern as most apps in-house had similar but it was 8x times higher than the general benchmark of ~400ms so, I had to create a guideline for those specifics and help developer by focusing on image optimization and creating red routes for the users to reduce number of requests to the server at one time. Along with that create ways of handling delay by creating microcopies and engaging preloaders so, the users constantly get feedback about what is happening.
Design concepts that were ultimately not pursued
While brainstorming with the team, we went through many ideas that ultimately did not make it to the solution.
Among those, one that was almost close to be prototyped was about creating the second version of existing programme with a different solution framework. We realised during voting-discussions that it would not gain any popularity because it did not met the foundational need of the users.
Another design concept that we prototyped, displayed details of map and event on the screen for listed events, but that was not preferred by the users because they felt it was too early for them to see such comprehensive detail when all they needed was information breadth not depth on that particular screen to quickly scan across and opt the right one.
UX Workshops
When we started with research and exploration of problem space most of the members displayed the habit of leading the users through questions rather than being exploratory. We were not able to do face-to-face interviews even as there were school holidays so, we arranged a tele-interview with 20 teachers. After the first round of interview, I saw the problem so, during the debriefing session gave a demo of how to interview, and as I was new to them so, I had to be careful about how I was commuting the knowledge without letting them feel being corrected. It was something new for me to do. After the 3rd round of interview, I observed some of the interviewers improved really well and the user insights were more qualitative and unique.
The solution(s)
Usability testing showed that users were struggling to adapt to the new way of participating or organising events through app. We decided to change the way information was displayed and introduced a dashboard for quick access to all events as well as notable features like earning badges and certificate.
We conducted additional usability testing with the same tasks and our new design, which showed an increase in findability compared to the previous round of testing. Users were able to adjust their notification settings, which gave them access to new event alerts.
Results
“...reduces 80% of my workload! Existing method of using WhatsApp requires a lot of back-and-forth...whereas this is just 'search and click [Attend]'. Easy to check how many are coming, much easier to manage the event...” - Primary School's Head of Science Department
“...The event creation in the app is similar to Facebook but is even simpler than that...” - Secondary School's Head of English Language Department
“...There is a good chance that I as an advocate teacher can meet teachers from other schools through this app, as whoever can sign up and come for my event...” - Primary School's Teacher and a fellow member of Teach for Malaysia
“The app looks shinier than any other apps we have created so far...” - App Architect
Metrics
The app was among the top 3 on Google playstore in Malaysia region, under events category, for the first entire quarter of beta launch and the downloads crossed 10,000 by first month, with relatively limited marketing efforts in comparison to other in-house apps that we had launched till date. The launch of the app immediately boosted visibility of events and crossed our expected target mark of 1000 per month ongoing sessions to 2000+ with 900 identifiable organisers which was a hopping 150% than the record we earlier had.
The data shown here is derived from the analytics after 3 months of beta launch
My learnings
Leading a team of 10 through Design Thinking and Agile process while navigating through the twists and turns of real time problem solving.
Defining and driving a complete brand strategy independently from grounds up through numerous iterations and tackling push backs from stakeholders while proposing solutions.
Tackling ad hoc requests and develop the ability to see the resulting patterns in a solution framework that could merge into an ongoing project or fork from one.
