Bridging the gaps in traditional & online classes

Developing a digital solution to facilitate classes online

Abstract

With the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the world was forced to move into a remote /online platform, education was one of them. As a student who experienced online education, I understood the system was not efficient and identified many problems. I observed that my friends & teachers were facing problems with online classes, thus decided to study and develop a solution.

Classdesk is a platform that aims to facilitate online classes for institutions and bridge the experience between online & traditional classes.

90%

Of users felt traditional classes to be better than online classes

My role

Initial discovery to testing

Timeline

2021 Jan - 2021 May (4 Months)

The team

Individual

Vertical

ED tech

B2C

Understanding the problem

I conducted research through an online survey among 50 students, Interviewed 20 stakeholders & Observed 4 stakeholders in the user environment to

To understand the system of online schooling.
Find out different levels of problems.
User adaptations & practices developed for online schooling.

Breaking down the iceberg

After primary research, the problems were further analyzed with journey mapping & empathy mapping to identify the root cause. Personas were built to empathize and understand the users. Further, I made a thematic analysis to break down the problems and compare & identify the direction of the solution.

Understanding the problem in smaller chunks

Solving the problem

At this point I affinity mapped all the findings and ideated on the problems. Further, the ideas were prioritized to define the scope for MVP.

Information architecture

Now that I decided on the features Information architecture was done by plotting all the MVP features on the User flow and site mapping was done to understand the hierarchy. The end solution has 3 portals ( management portal, teachers portal & students portal).

Medium fidelity iterations

After sketching I converted the iterations into medium fidelity and the selected variations were then A/B tested. Changes were made based on the tests.

How might we increase efficiency & decrease workload

Including all work use cases & streamlining them

Users use multiple applications for different academic purposes which adds workload to manage them & reduces efficiency.
With the digital shift other academic work like paper correction, Project follow-ups were difficult as there was no catered application for it.

Class desk Unifies all the academic work into one platform & provides analytics & management features for easy use. It also facilitates other academic work.

Result analysis

Project management

How might we reduce emotional gap & increase interest

Using personalised interactive characters for improvising the emotional connect

From the research I understood that students & teachers turn off-camera due to other reasons, this reduces emotional connect
Teachers don't get visual feedback from students which leads to prolonged sessions without breaks.
The average concentration span is around 20 mins and prolonged session leads to other issues like eye strain & headaches.

Users have personalised characters which is an alternative to video feeds, these characters are movable & respond based on time & class ambiance. The characters reduce the emotional gap & give feedback to the teacher, they also help users with doing exercises for concentration & eyestrain.

Classroom with interactive characters

Characters helping with eye exercise

Using intuitive notifications

During the research, I found that academics were more of a team activity where students would get compare themselves with classmates & act accordingly. We all know we would attend classes if our friend does and skip them if they skipped.

Using this psychology the notifications were made more intuitive to encourage students to submit do their tasks.

App notifications

How might we improvise administration

Providing analytics at different levels

With the shift to digital, administration took a major hit the traditional system couldn't be converted for an online environment.

Now after having a unified platform data collection & analysis is easier. The platform provides analytics at multiple levels for easier administration.

Management dashboard with class insights

Teacher's analysis

Student's analysis

User testing

Now that the designs are in place I conducted user testing with 20 users and observed if they were able to achieve their tasks successfully. With testing, I observed some users faced difficulties in finding some features and exploring them. Changes were made based on testing.

95%

Of users were able to navigate & achieve their goals easily

I added tooltips & initial product tour to help users explore and be aware of all the features.

Tooltips & product tour added for easier app exploring

Few screens