Smart People : Learn and have fun !
By: Océane R.
Tags: Usability, Ideation, Design, UI, Case Study

Smart People : Learn and have fun !

Brief

Smart People Inc. is an educational company, founded in 2014. They propose languages courses, including French, Spanish, German and more, for kids and teenagers from 12 to 21 years old.

What makes this company attractive is the summer camp, where hundreds of teenagers join every year. The program include sport, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games and more cool stuff to teach languages as enjoyable as possible.

The main problem is that many students are unable to attend the summer camp due to cost and time reasons, but would like to have an access to the curriculum.

The Challenge

As UX/UI Designers, our project is about finding a digital solution for the students who are unable to attend the summer camp by building an online learning platform for them. Our goal is about transforming the in-person learning experience into a complete digital one, at a lower cost.

We started our project by doing a Competitors Analysis, including DuoLingo, Speekoo, Tandem, Gymlish, Babbel, Busuu and Memrise in order to understand what were the strengths and the weaknesses, what is the main objective and even what is missing, what can be add. This analysis gave us ideas of the kind of application the users are expecting. We noticed some positive aspects on this kind of application, as fun, humor, challenges with points, chat with users…

The pain points were mainly about the lack of human interaction, in fact there is no real coach for the users, even if they can exchange with chats or private messages, this could not replace the human contact in daily life.

The User Research

Through our market research, we also learned that every application must change to all ages, this is the reason why we decided to be focused on students aged 18 to 21. We planned around twenty questions about the languages learning at school and the digital one.

Interviews Time !

Then, our strategy was to conduct interviews with the concerned users : we get really interesting feedbacks. We learned with the 6 users we interviewed that what they mainly want is to practice, exchanges with others and more human interaction : the social aspect is missing in languages learning.

In order to get more insight about their needs, we chose to share a survey based on what we heard during interviews. We focused on the digital aspect, asking question about which features should be found in an educational application and we get around 20 answers. To sum up, what they really want is :

Flexibility

Humor

Quizzes

Human interaction

Group activities

Culture learning

But the most important is to get customized courses, actually all the users voted for this option.

The user research brought us a lot of information which allowed us to create our empathy map in order to better understand our users’ feelings.

Empathy Map

What our users would like to have on a learning platform is practice, interaction, culture learning and of course, customized courses with feedback but also have a fun and immersive experience. With all these information we created our user personal who stands for all the students aged 18 to 21, likely to use the Smart People app.

User Persona

As shown through our persona, Tom wants an interactive, engaging and personalized experience while attending online Smart People Summer Camp because he wants to have fun while improving his English skills.

Our problem statement was the following :

How might we help Tom to get an interactive, engaging and personalized experience while attending online Smart People Summer Camp ?

Our Solution

Customized profile

Choice of themes

4 curriculum which stand for the 4 weeks

5 themes : 1 per day from Monday to Friday

Chat : with a personal coach and other users

Quizzes

Workshop : Online and IRL

Ideation Time

We started to ideate by using the Crazy 8’s tool. At first, my idea was to include games as quizzes and challenges on the app and get fictional rewards and maybe add a ranking, so this could be a competition between the users. Then I thought about adding the option for the user to choose his favorite themes to get customized courses according to his preferences. I would also add a daily challenges with a points system where the user can learn about culture and also discover books, musics or movies in the language he is learning. Then I imagined a digital travel where the user travels around a country and he can visit a lot of cities and learn facts about it.

Crazy 8’s #1

Based on the Worst Ideas tool, which consist to generate bad ideas in order to turn them into good ones, we came up with crazy ideas, maybe not politically-correct ones, but it actually gave us some very interesting ideas. We thought about including a prevent course about the bullying, as we would create a multi-users platform.

Worst Ideas

As we were not satisfied with our ideas, we decided to make a second round of Crazy 8’s. To summarize my ideation, the user will start with a language test in order to know his level and be in the correct one.

I also imagined an interface as Netflix where the user is invited to choose his favorite themes, then he could have a suggestion of exercices and could choose the ones he wants and could have access to the planning.

Crazy 8’s #2

Features Prioritization

At first, we used the MOSCOW method, which consist to choose which features must, should, could and won’t be in our prototype. In other words, we wanted to choose which information are primary in our app.