Problem

There were many challenges collectively shape the objectives of the Learnverse project, aiming to create a more engaging, personalized, and user-friendly learning experience for students and parents alike.

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Lack of Inherent Learning Motivation:

• Issue: Children typically do not naturally seek out educational content or study time on their own. Left to their own devices, they may not use the platform regularly, leading to reduced engagement and hindered learning progress.
• Challenge: Designing a learning platform that effectively motivates and engages children, making the learning experience enjoyable and enticing.

‍Diverse Entry Points in Learning Journey:

• Issue: Students may join Learnstation at different times during the academic year. Some start at the beginning of the school year, while others join midway.
• Challenge: Creating a flexible learning environment that accommodates students at various points in their educational journey, ensuring they can seamlessly integrate into the platform's ongoing activities.

Parental Guidance and Study Plans:

• Issue: Many parents may not have the expertise to determine an optimal learning path for their children. They often rely on external sources like Byju’s, the internet, or other parents for guidance on their child's study plan.
• Challenge: Providing parents with tools and guidance within the Learnstation platform to assist them in understanding and actively supporting their child's educational journey.

Progress Tracking and Learning Outcomes:

• Issue: Parents require visibility into their child's daily and weekly progress within the study plan. Additionally, they seek insights into their child's achievement of learning outcomes.
• Challenge: Developing a clear and user-friendly interface that allows parents to monitor their child's educational progress and grasp their performance against learning objectives.

‍Fragmented Learning Experience:

• Issue: Learning content is scattered across multiple apps, resulting in a fragmented user experience. Users lack a unified view of the content they need to access to learn a particular topic.
• Challenge: Integrating content seamlessly from various sources while creating an intuitive interface that provides a coherent learning experience.‍

‍Content Flow and Frequency:

• Issue: Certain content types are recommended on a daily basis, while others are suggested weekly. Determining the optimal flow of topics for each student can be challenging.
• Challenge: Designing a platform that accommodates diverse learning needs, ensuring that content is delivered at the appropriate frequency for each user.

‍Content Discovery Difficulty:

• Issue: Users, both parents, and children, may find it challenging to locate specific content within the app that aligns with the content suggested in the PDF study plan.
• Challenge: Improving content discovery mechanisms within the platform to make it easier for users to access the recommended materials.

‍Engagement and Retention:

• Issue: The platform faces challenges related to engagement, stickiness, and retention. Metrics like D30 retention of premium users, daily active users (DAU), and DAU-to-daily users (DU) ratios indicate areas for improvement.
• Challenge: Enhancing the user experience to increase engagement, stickiness, and retention rates, ensuring that users continue to find value and relevance in Learnstation.

Goal

Short-Term Objectives:

• Drive Habit Formation: Learnverse aims to instill a habit of consistent learning in children by gently nudging them to follow daily study plan recommendations. It understands the importance of routine in a child's development and leverages this to create a lasting impact.
• Engage Young Learners: Recognizing that engagement is key to effective learning, Learnverse engages kindergarten children for one hour and students in grades 1, 2, and 3 for one and a half hours daily. It strikes a balance between core learning and co-curricular activities to keep learning fun and exciting.
• Balanced Curriculum: Learnverse divides the engagement time into core learning modules such as DBEL (Digital Basic English & Language) and B-Math (Basic Mathematics) while also offering co-curricular learning through platforms like Tynker, Osmo, and Epic. This holistic approach ensures a well-rounded education.
• Parental Involvement: Learnverse provides parents with a clear view of their child's daily, weekly, and monthly progress against the study plan. This transparency encourages parental involvement and allows them to actively support their child's learning journey.‍

‍Long-Term Objectives:

• Exciting Learning Experience: Learnverse aspires to make the study plan as exciting for children as their favorite games. By gamifying the learning process and incorporating interactive elements, it aims to foster a love for learning that lasts a lifetime.
• Outcome-Oriented Learning: Learnverse measures student performance against well-articulated learning outcomes. It goes beyond traditional assessments to provide a comprehensive view of a student's growth and development.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Learnverse is designed to engage four key stakeholders:‍

Students

‍It empowers students to take charge of their learning journey, motivating them to set and achieve their goals.

‍Parents

‍Parents are kept informed about their child's progress and can actively participate in their education.‍

Mentors

‍Learnverse provides mentors with valuable insights into a student's strengths and areas that need improvement, allowing for personalized guidance.‍

Business

‍Byju's, as the driving force behind Learnverse, is committed to enhancing the educational experience, ensuring its sustainability and scalability.

Learnverse envisions a future where learning is not just a necessity but a source of joy and curiosity for every child. It aims to nurture young minds, helping them unlock their full potential and become lifelong learners who are excited about the journey of knowledge acquisition.

Why Study Plan?

~20% of students are engaging more than 5 days a week with the device. There are high chances that a %age of these users are following the study plan as the plan suggests the child to spend minimum 35 hours/month (5 days/week) on learning.

There’s an opportunity to move the needle for the remaining 80% of users by engaging them with the study plan

Parents have showed immense interest in receiving the study plan on time and have even escalated issues in the past when they did not receive PDF study plan on time

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Characteristics of a good study plan

Outlines learning goals, big and small and tracks performance against them

Drives good studying and learning habits

Creates an organized schedule, specific or flexible depending on tasks

Gives an updated view of user progress against recommended tasks

Early Ideation

We kicked off a design sprint together with the lead Product Manager on the approach of How can we make the study plan as exciting for kids as any other game they love?

Early Research Findings

The 3 main psychological needs these games tend to fill for kids:

• Competence
• Autonomy
• Relatedness

The games promise kids to take them on an adventure, are visually appealing and allows them to do microtransactions to buy/unlock new avatars, characters.

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Competitors

Prodigy

Dreambox Learning

Using Figma as a remote collaboration tool, we gathered inspiration of how other forward-thinking our study plans, and shared what we like about them.

Then, we did a quick solution sketching together to end the sprint. This mini design sprint was condensed into 2 hours as our schedule were packed.

On a separate session, we established 4 design principles for the landing page to make sure we design based on these principles. These principles are centered around our consumers—How to innovate the vision to transform the way children learn, grow, and succeed.

‍‍We started sketching some crazy ideas on our minds. Our focus at this stage is to diverge first, converge later.

This is how the early wireframes looked like. We mapped out the purpose of each section, aligning with our pointers we wanted to cover in our study plan. The primary goal is to make the study plan easy for our children.

• Tasks presented in weekly view slotted by day
• DBEL tasks are grouped by topic
• Live classes and post class are shown on day’s schedule (yet to be decided if it has to be synced with DBEL)
• Reading time is slotted daily and Playing & Coding time is slotted weekly
• Weekly view will be the cold-start view and the calendar will open a daily/weekly view based on the last state selected by the user
• The calendar weekly view will automatically adjust to a 6-day/7-day view based on the number of days for which DBEL creates the weekly plan

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We then turn these early ideas into high fidelity designs. We experimented with different colors, shapes, layouts. But it felt all over the place, so we continued to refine these designs.

Here's the outcome after several iterations, though this is not the final design. We needed a design that is solid enough to kickstart the user test, so we can learn what people really think about our Study plan. We fail fast, in order to learn faster.

User Testing

A heatmap is generated to help us understand how people interact with the study plan.

From the heatmap, we found that 40% of users can easily switch b/w weekly and daily. We were worried people won't notice some clickable elements, but the heatmap results proved otherwise.

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The impact of the Learnverse Study App was truly transformative. Engagement levels soared, with D30 retention of premium users reaching approximately 30%. Daily active users (DAU) increased to around 17%, while DAU/DAU (daily active users per daily active user) rose to approximately 41%.

MVP Designs

Here's a detailed walkthrough of what I we made in this Study Plan.

Reflecting on this journey, I am immensely proud of the Learnverse Study App's success. It was a project that combined user-centric design principles with innovative gamification, resulting in a powerful tool that makes learning an adventure for children.

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The Learnverse Study App's journey exemplifies the power of design to make a positive impact. By crafting an engaging, user-centered experience, we transformed the way young learners approach their education. It's a testament to the possibilities of design in shaping the future of learning.

Development

Detailed Design Specifications: Provide the developer with comprehensive design specifications that include measurements, color codes, fonts, and detailed guidelines for implementing the UI. This ensures that the developer has clear instructions for translating design elements into code.

Asset Delivery: Deliver all design assets, such as icons, images, illustrations, and animations, in the required formats and sizes for implementation. Organize these assets in a way that is easily accessible to the developer.

Interaction Design Clarification: Explain any interactive elements and transitions that may not be immediately apparent from static designs. Describe how animations, hover effects, or other interactive features should function.

Feedback and Iteration: I addressed questions and taken feedback from the developer during the implementation phase. I collaborated with developers to make necessary adjustments or clarifications to ensure the final product aligns with the intended design.

Consistency Checks: Continuously monitor the development progress to ensure design consistency across different parts of the application. Address any discrepancies promptly.

Future Steps

Here are our future plans for the Study Plan:
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Goals Setting

Well articulated learning outcomes

Schedule

Async content part of pre-class & post-class journey

Lightly moderated to nudge students to complete study plan recommended tasks before in time.

Tracking Progress

Updation of all tasks on real time bases (including interim progress for DBEL videos).

Habit formation

Reward system V2 (BFS coins or newly-built)

Ambient display

Notifications