MetaLearn

2021

Helping on-the-go artists use Spotify to manage their own presence online while sharing music with fans.

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2021

The Problem

Metalearn is a soon-to-launch, startup software as a service company that aims to help people be more effective when studying and learning. Learning is a skill, one that most people aren’t well trained in. As a result, many students choose study techniques that are ineffective or give the illusion of learning, but in fact are just “busy work”. On top of this, in this age of limited attention spans, avoiding procrastination and staying focused when learning is a challenge, and many students require structure and support to build strong learning habits.

Learning is hard for many people because they do not use effective techniques and find it difficult to focus and structure their study tasks and time. This is because learning science is not well applied. Many students adopt ineffective or stagnant study systems based on trial and error or ones that are learned from others that aren’t necessarily maximally efficient or helpful.

My team came to this project with the intention to make it easy for learners to set and manage their study goals whilst giving them access to relevant resources and useful study techniques that would help them to save time and enhance the overall learning experience.

Metalearn aims to help students in two ways:

Increase study frequency by building strong study habits through the creation of a study schedule, managing tasks and course outlines/curriculums, setting goals and visualising data and analytics around study frequency and habits.
Enable students to study more effectively with deliberate action toward effective learning techniques and through setting clear study goals and supplementing this with relevant tips and resources along the way

The Goal

The main goal of this project was to enable lifelong learners and self-directed individuals to learn effectively, sustainably and durably. The design of the product needed to be improved on a web platform level. Pain points and needs of learners needed to be researched, understood and analysed in order to inform a more intuitive and useful design of the platform. Ultimately, we needed to create a suite of new features to support lifelong learners in their studies.

The Solution

A web-based MVP that enable users to organise, track and monitor their learning activities and goals whilst accessing evidence based learning techniques.

Process: Double Diamond

Research

To understand the brief, we needed to start with some comprehensive research into the needs, pain points and current behaviour of online learners. To achieve this we conducted both qualitative and quantitative research with students at all stages of life. We surveyed 38 students and analysed 1000’s of comments to gain an understanding of the demographic’s needs. We also completed 26 one-to-one interviews with potential online learners.

This research revealed some interesting insights including the top three current learning strategies preferred by students being:

Note taking
Re-reading
Active recall

While students outlined some very common study techniques, those utilised weren’t necessarily grounded in evidence based research. We also found that students were easily distracted by their mobile devices with 76.3% saying they were distracted by their phones while completing online studies. 78.9% of potential students also admitted to not having a defined study schedule leading to time wasting and missed opportunities for learning.

In order to achieve their goals it was clear that we were going to need to build in features to support high quality learning and knowledge retention as existing techniques were simply offering the illusion of progressing through learning.

The top four frustrations of learners were:

Time Management
Distractions
Group Work
Study Material

Through our research we clarified the importance and need for online learning; many interview respondents shared their desire to gain employment through the pursuit of further learning opportunities. They also highlighted the need to learn useful skills, so course content needed to be re-evaluated to remain competitive in the online learning space. As students progressed through learning they shared their feelings of boredom, stress and apathy. This clearly marked a need for the course structure and supporting features to be highly engaging and built to retain the attention of online learners.

What I Discovered

Through a SWOT analysis we came to the conclusion that the current Education Technology landscape is not meeting the needs of modern students who want to be self-directed in their learning. For learners who want to take a more active role in learning, they need to use various platforms to cobble together a solution to meet their various learning needs.

Metalearn ultimately needs to provide a solution that offers efficient learning sessions paired with empirically validated study techniques to create a full-service learning platform tailored to the highly motivated, self-led learners of today.

Our Minimum Viable Product was designed with a core focus on three areas:

Organising study: goal setting, schedule creation and task management.
Tracking learning: time boxed study sessions to improve focus and memory.
Review and improve: capture and surface insights with analytics on study habits.

For the development of the Minimum Viable Product we focused on a variety of study tools and features to enable learning in an engaging, efficient manner. This included features such as visual analytics, learning tips and advice throughout studies, a study timer, a basic weekly and monthly agenda as well as learning goals for each subject.

Our research led us to define one persona, Chris, who we used to build out our Affinity Map and other key UI/UX approaches to support the development of Minimum Viable Product. Through our Affinity Map we gathered critical insights including the desire for learners to be able to write things down within the application, and a need for external accountability throughout the learning journey

Affinity Mapping

We then made use of the How Might We framework to clarify our concepts around the core problems that we needed to address for Metalearn. This included:

HMW encourage better study habits amongst students and increase efficiency while studying/learning?

HMW build awareness of inefficient study habits and motivate students to study?

In the ideation and development phase of the product I facilitated a Remote Co-Design workshop for 13 attendees including two individuals from Metalearn. All elements of the design workshop and facilitation of it were directed by and created by me. This was a comprehensive workshop tackling the core issues of learners and focusing on the needs of the three previously identified personas. We reviewed the functionality and design of the wireframes in order to further edit the product to suit the various needs established throughout the workshop.

With the Crazy 8’s activity we were able to ideate 104 potential features which were then reduced down to a core group of 28 clear concepts in our debrief session.

The persona we focused on throughout our ideation phase was the professional upskiller, Chris. He’s a 24 year old digital marketer who’s using Metalearn as his first online learning experience. Previously he hasn’t struggled with coursework but he’s finding the pace of the online course quite demanding. As far as learning styles go, he’s a kinesthetic and visual learner who benefits from information being contextualised when delivered for ease of understanding. He finds group work frustrating and when there’s too much information provided with not enough time to absorb it, he feels overwhelmed.

Prototype

To start with we developed a high fidelity wireframe to get a clear idea of the user journey throughout the learning process. This enabled us to gather further insights to refine our design and features for a strong Minimum Viable Product.

We then developed a mobile prototype and a web prototype in order to show the value of both versions of the platform and the accessibility enabled through the new design. Upon the launch of the initial prototype we had 180+ subscribers on the waitlist to get their hands on the beta version; it was clearly a much-desired feature expansion for the brand.

With the redesign of the landing page we took into consideration from users including the 73% preference for images being above the fold to encourage scrolling behaviour. 95% of users shared that they wanted to see more snapshots of the learning modules throughout Metalearn in order to familiarize themselves with the platform. We also developed a personalised portal for individuals to be able to access all features to customize their study journey.

Overall the prototype was developed with features from project management combined with task management and advice and guidance in order to create a highly productive, highly engaging system for online learners.

Through user testing we also uncovered the opportunity to add short tips and quotes to the top navigation bar to create a more engaging experience for learners. With the client’s help and user testing feedback we then narrowed down what users would prefer on a desktop solution as opposed to a mobile solution. With this in mind we went back and updated our prototype in order to deliver on two strategically designed low fidelity prototypes for mobile and desktop.

Once sign off was achieved we went into developing a high fidelity prototype to enable further large-scale user testing, made up of two rounds of rigorous testing. For our first prototype test we enlisted 16 users to define and refine the product, and then we tested with another group of 8 users to come to the final prototype design.

Conclusion

If I was to do things differently, I would have diversified the user testing portfolio to get broader feedback and validate features utilising a mix of card sorting and tree sorting to identify the best user flow. I’d also revisit the user flow testing earlier in the process and use techniques such as card sorting and tree sorting to determine the best user flow experience on both mobile and desktop platforms. I would also revisit personas and use research to validate the existing persona utilised for the prototype.

Overall we needed a deeper analysis of the product in order to streamline feedback and validate the proposed features. This would have meant prioritising pain point vs feature analysis to strengthen the Minimum Viable Product prior to prototyping. Although we took some short cuts due to time constraints the team overall learned a lot from the process and were able to go back to rectify mistakes in order to build a great product with a wonderful user experience.

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1. Discover

2. Define

3. Develop

4. Deliver

MEtaLearn

Enable students and learners to study more effectively with deliberate action toward effective learning techniques

My Role

Team Lead

UX Research

UX Design

Workshop Facilitator

Remote Team

Jessica Hau

Sabrina Singh

Michael Clowes

Wayne Tikisci

Michelle Bi

Iresha Dewendra

Jeremy Shellim

Agnes Boen

Raymond Zeng

Sorab Del Rio

Jerry Zhang

Timeline

3 weeks | April 2021