Overview

My Role

UX Designer

The Team

2 UX Designers

Duration

September-October 2022

Tools Used

Figma, Origami, Jira, Miro

Key Contributions

Competitive Analysis, UX Design, Information Architecture, User Research, User Testing

Empathize

Background Research
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis

Ideate

Feature Prioritization
User Flows
Site Mapping

Create

Low-fi Wireframes
Defining UI
Prototyping
Building

Verify

User Testing
Iterating

Overview

My Role

UX Designer

The Team

2 UX Designers

Duration

September-October 2022

Tools Used

Figma, Origami, Jira, Miro

Key Contributions

Competitive Analysis, UX Design, Information Architecture, User Research, User Testing

Empathize

Background Research
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis

Ideate

Feature Prioritization
User Flows
Site Mapping

Create

Low-fi Wireframes
Defining UI
Prototyping
Building

Verify

User Testing
Iterating

63% of participants learn new skills by teaching themselves.

How We Learn

Empathize

Research

After struggling for years to pick up skills ranging from languages to instruments, my friend Alex and I sent out a survey to over 60 people to get to the bottom of what makes learning new skills so difficult.

Most learners expressed frustration with a lack of guiding feedback.

Common Frustrations

58% of people cite community as an important reason that they continue to practice a skill.

Why We Continue

Empathize

Research

How We Learn

63% of participants learn new skills by teaching themselves.

Common Frustrations

Most learners expressed frustration with a lack of guiding feedback.

Why We Continue

58% of people cite community as an important reason that they continue to practice a skill.

Challenge

People teaching themselves new skills need reliable, accessible feedback and a source of community to learn faster and more effectively.

We then took a look at the competitive landscape to analyze what offerings already existed, and where there might be a gap in the market.

While there are many resources for people to supplement their independent learning, from TakeLessons to MasterClass, there currently isn't anything that is...

Competitive Analysis

Free

Most learning options cost money or aren't interactive.

Community-oriented

Online learning programs typically lack any way to connect with other people.

Flexible

If you want to receive quality instruction, you'll often need to commit to weeks or months of lessons.

IdeatE

Once we had an idea of the common frustrations that people faced, we created a user persona to humanize the needs we were addressing. Our primary user is someone who values community and loves learning, but has struggled to find the time to keep up with practicing their hobbies.

With our target user in mind, we brainstormed and narrowed our ideas down to three promising solutions based off of our analysis of where there were gaps in the market.

Our Solution

We landed on the idea of creating a platform for people to share and learn from people in their community through in-person, virtual, or asynchronous connections. Leveraging the skills of people in your community is a great way to offer a free and interactive experience, while incorporating asynchronous tools makes getting feedback easy and accessible.

Skillevate: A free app that helps people learn from and teach skills to members of their community.

Rather than generating design patterns from scratch, we considered the search and matching patterns from streaming services, dating apps, and travel sites to come up with a blueprint for how ours can look.
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We settled on a layout that mimics Airbnb. The horizontal scroll at the top allows you to quickly browse through multiple categories, while the cards below show the updated results of your search. This minimizes the steps the user has to take before being able to see and match with other users.

Mid-fidelity prototype

We then created a mid-fi screen for each step of the user journey, beginning with downloading the app and creating an account, then searching for a skill, then reaching out and scheduling a meetup. This made it easy for us to tell a story through our prototype.

Create

With our prototype prepared, it was time to test. We asked five different people to portray the character of Krystal and to sign up, search for the skill “climbing,” choose someone to reach out to, schedule a meetup, and view their upcoming events.

Verify

What we found:

Choosing a teacher is difficult: the information provided on our user cards made it hard to differentiate between different teachers.
Method of proposing time was clunky: the design for our time proposal screen was small and used 5 different vertical scrollers, which made it crowded and difficult to use.
Exciting concept: overall, people were excited by the value our app would provide as a free, community-based solution to receiving feedback.

We set out to work on fixing the problems in our design. The first step was changing user cards in the search page to show skill level and user stats.

Our new user cards offered the information that people said would be most helpful in differentiating between different teachers: experience level, meeting attendance, number of meetings, response time, and photo.

Next, we updated the time proposal widget to include a calendar picker and allow users to pick start and end times. The new calendar picker expands into a fullscreen modal, offering the space for users to easily pick a date and scroll through times.

Final Designs

I used Origami Studio to bring my prototypes to life.

Browsing between different categories makes the process of connecting to your community transparent: you can see faces, location, experience and more in a single glance.

Smart search and filters make it easy to connect to a teacher for whatever skill you want to learn, whether you want to meet in-person, online, or just ask questions.

Measuring Success

To determine whether our solution to the problem was successful, I looked at both conceptual success and UX success. A conceptually successful design should:

Offer a source of feedback to people learning skills on their own.
Be free and flexible
Make for an interactive, community-focused learning experience.

Based on the feedback we received from our first round of testing, as well as the "rubric" we created through our user persona and problem statement, I believe that Skillevate is able to check all of the above boxes.

A successful UX design should be:

Functional
Fun and intuitive to use
Accessible according to WCAG standards

The thinking we put into our initial layouts, as well as the features and changes we made it our design after testing, helped us achieve a functional and intuitive design. However, there is always more work to be done in achieving the above goals, which leads me to...

Next Steps

Though I’m proud of what we’ve made, there are so many things that I would like to add to the app:

Testing, testing, testing: we need to verify that the changes we made and the new features we added work as we intended.

New features: asynchronous tools (document and video annotations), social media feed, calendar auto-scheduling, message prompts, and more.

Accessibility: adding in voice-to-text features and double-checking color contrast and visibility guidelines.

What I Learned

This project saw me take an abstract, vague idea born out of a problem I was personally experiencing all the way into a prototype for an app that could solve that same problem for thousands of people. I learned how to think like an entrepreneur as we developed a product from scratch, with all of the pivots and refinement that occur along the way. I was able to put all of the skills I’ve gained since I started DesignLab back in February into practice, and develop my prototyping knowledge further.

Most importantly, this project helped give me the confidence to say that I have the know-how and the mindset to be a successful product designer. I can function comfortably at all stages of a project, from research to visual design. I can cooperate with a partner or within a larger team, earnestly sharing my ideas but also listening and conceding to others when it’s appropriate. I’m proud of the hundreds of hours I’ve put into becoming a strong designer, and even more appreciative of the change that I’ve seen within myself.