Early 2020, Covid-19 brought a sudden lifestyle change to almost everybody in the world. Very few industries had contingencies in place for transition into a fully remote experience. Schools in third world countries had to play catch with online learning as it was something most schools had never adopted pre-pandemic.
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It was the perfect opportunity for a Education Technology(EdTech) platform like Edves, who had a working EdTech solution that integrated well with traditional methods of learning and curriculum in the Nigerian and the African schools as a whole.
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I was approached by Edves to help building on the experiences they have acquired in the African EdTech space over a period of 4 years. The goal was for me to redesign and expand on the current platform, to elevate the experience of existing users and to also acquire new users whose demand for online learning has risen drastically since the start of Covid-19 lockdown.

Edves has been around for around 4 years and has been plagued by design and technical debt because enough effort was not put in place to craft a good user experience when it started. Often, there are user complaints of how tedious it is to navigate through the platform, especially as a new user and how below par the visuals were compared to it's competitors.

Edves had a complex user type and hierarchy structure that used the platform for various reasons. Some of these user types had sub-types that also needed unique design solutions. The need to address the unique needs of Edves' various user types was one of the main challenge.In other to better understand the users, I had to carry out different research types to understand their pain-points and how they interact with the platform.

I had a really short time frame to come up with a web and mobile solution that addresses the problems the platform is facing. This tight time frame was because of our goal to take advantage of the demand that came with the pandemic.

One quick realization I came to was that making different designs for each user groups that uniquely elevates the experience positively was going to be time consuming and the final solution will be way out of budget.

We needed a solution that can be implemented fast and has a solid foundation that can be built upon subsequently.

Competitor analysis was a major strategy I utilized because of the constraints of the project. "Since I had a limited time & budget for research and one of the major goals was scalability, I spent a considerable amount of time learning from competitors, majorly Byju's and Google Classroom"

This approach proved effective as it gave me a head start in the research process and saved me a considerable amount of time.

To keep things moving as fast as possible, one of the method I adopted to understand the platform and user pain-points was to conduct an online survey. The goal was to get enough information to synthesise some solutions that can be quickly tested and refined.

A survey was sent out to major stake holders, customer facing employees and users to find out their pain-points about the platform. The goal was to consolidate the feedbacks and rank these pain-points to provide an actionable list of prioritized design solutions.

To support the surveys, I carried out an in-depth heuristic evaluation on all pages of the platform to identify usability problems in the user interface design.

I modelled my heuristics according to Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction designThis severity of each evaluation principle was documented for each major page of the platform to help prioritise what needs to be addressed. Each evaluation I made came with a recommendation that represented an opportunity for what can be improved from a usability stand point.

I also conducted a semi structured interview on zoom with 5 people that has a working knowledge of the Edves platform and has been interacting with the platform for at least a year. These interviews gave important insights into how people interacted with the platform and their pain-points when usng the platform.

From my research, I was able to prioritise 3 actionable steps to drive my design solution.

The combination of the competitor analysis, data analyzed from the survey, heuristic evaluation and semi-structured interview gave enough insight for me to form some solution hypothesis that attempts to solve  the problems in alignment to business goals.

From the consolidation of all research data, I prioritized 3 areas where changes can be made for drastic improvements. These changes were meant to be tested and refined as quickly as possible before passing them on to development.

Welcoming Visual Language - How can we build a platform with a visual language that appeals to each category of user that will be in contact with this platform?
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‍Visual language should be customizable and change depending on the category of user i.e parent, student, teacher.

Simpler language, navigation and data display: How do we simplify the learning curve for first time/inexperienced users?
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- School-like terms should be used for easy understanding
- Simple charts and data visualization methods should be used
- Information should be presented based on currency and urgency

Personalisation for Schools: How can we make the experience of each school unique and in-brand on the Edves platform?

- Create overall customisable colours
- Create unique illustrations depending on the colours

At this point, I had enough data to start visualising what the solution will look like. I aligned my proposed solution with the stakeholders, I then proceeded to start designing the solutions starting with the wireframes to quickly test and validate my ideas and solution hypothesis.

With these wireframes, I was able to validate ideas and flows iteratively before making the hi-fi designs.

After iterating upon the wireframes extensively and I was confident in the solution that I was creating, I then proceeded to start the designing the high fidelity version of those wireframe. I was continuously iterating and improving the high fidelity designs based on feedbacks.About half way into the hi-fi designs, I noticed a pattern of feedback that always came up especially with the younger audience.

Even though iteration during the wireframing stage cut out many of the possible problems, we discovered a huge problem with the visual language when testing the hi-fi designs.

When testing the high fidelity designs with real users, especially younger students, we discovered a huge problem with the visual language. They just could not related with the overly-serious design. This in turn lowered the appeal of the design to younger audience. In a space where we really needed to capture the attention of students, this was not acceptable.

In a bid to save time and work within budget, I made a mistake of making the assumption that we can apply a one-size-fits-all visual language for all user types which turned out to be a wrong assumption.

To fix the problem of the boring visual language for younger students, I added another actionable solution hypothesis that will work within our timeframe and budget.

Unique Visual Language for different user types - How do we make sure the platform appeals to it’s different users and also encourage visitation from users especially for Students?
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- Use age appropriate illustration depending on the user category
- Gamify student part of the platform for appeal and fun
- Simplify flow and reduce number of clicks to achieve results.

Due to time and budget constraint, I leveraged free online illustration resources and adjusted them to fit the design.

Getting to the final design required lots of iterations, but overall, I was able to come up with a solution that works within the time and budget constraints of the project.

UI screens and illustration designed for Edves

Given an extended time and budget, there are many options I would have loved to explore, especially when it comes to creating unique experiences for different user types.

Overall, I'm happy I was able to build a solution that is scalable even with the constraints I had.

Thanks for reading 😎