In this project, I was the solo designer who worked on it from start to finish. I worked on its UX, its UI and its animations. I did collaborate with other designers from time to time to fast pace the work, leading the team and making the vision come to reality. I worked on motion design as well. There were iterations on iterations, making the product better with each one.
Interaction Design
2022-2024
Solo Designer
The project started with a simple requirement - the design for a product they are conceptualising for students of Grade X-XII from International Curriculum. I was given an excel sheet of data they had collected.
I performed the Information Architecture and the Task Flows to come up with a unique App for that purpose. I also proposed new features like Step Assist and mapped out how the other features would work in action, bringing words to visuals.
This happened in 2023 August. the founders had an idea to make a tool for unlimited math questions using AI for practising maths. By the time I had joined in November, They had circulated a google form to all students to validate this. I joined in and started tagging the data and collecting insights of student's opinions, needs and gaps.
Unlimited 'resources' already available
Pen & Paper Supremacy
Free practise problems
Real Life Application
Being Stuck
Stepwise Video Solutions with Reasoning
Tailor Made
Tips & Tricks
Reasons for Positive Outlook on Maths
My Suggestions for the Product
Community Feature for Doubts
Rather than unlimited questions, the demand is for explanations, doubts and help. A community feature like codecademy where people answer doubts while learning and practising a programming language would be of great value.
A way to explain real life application
The problems could be tailor made in such a manner that it would show them ways that they could actually use it in real life.
Upon brainstorming, he came up with an idea for quizzes based off real life hobbies to help pique interest and apply concepts to their interests.
Move away from question generation
CBSE and ICSE both demanded better explanation, tutors for concepts, but did not want practise questions. However students from IB did not demand explanation either. This could be due to better faculties in class.
However, this has intense market competition and thus, the founder decided to shift the target audience for practise questions to IB Curriculum.
He suggested that IB Curriculum does not have enough unlimited practise questions, and those books are very expensive.
Proposing a community feature, I asked for help to connect with students and make this happen to see if we could understand what kind of difficulties arise, and what could it bring out.
Insights from Interviews
Limited Scope to monetise with this Mental Model
Students already have college groups, tuitions and seniors to connect to in case of doubts. With Youtube and Chatgpt, it's just better. Would be hard to make students pay per use fee for something they expect for free.
Scope for Seniors Limited
It's unlikely to connect to seniors for study related doubts but more on guidance to achieve what they have done - universities, competitions and more. This could be done through LinkedIn as well. There is not much scope for connecting to a senior just for a chapter related doubt.
Could expect a change in mental model
However, this could also be different once monetisation comes in, the mental model could change and they could ask silly doubts as well.
Can't sell to Schools
Looking at the insights, the founder decided that the goal was to have something that they could sell to schools, rather than students directly.
A practise question generator would become a way for teachers to generate mock papers after they have taught a concept or subject in school, which could be used by students at home. I aligned with his vision.
2 Iterations
The design was done in 2 phases. During the first phase, it went from scratch to some visual screens. During the 2nd phase, the whole team had much more clarity into what needs to be built based on suggestions from various people. And by that time, I had also started evaluating the design and started to find what could be made better.
The gap between the 2 was almost 6 months.
Design PRD v1
Job to be Done: The user hires this tool to get his maths answers assessed, practise mock papers and improve his math scores at school.
This product should contain:
Image Analysis and OCR to read and understand a solved sum on paper.
An unlimited question generator to create curriculum based mock papers.
Step wise answers to questions
Identifying progress in each strong and weak areas of the student.
The next phase:
Predicted Grades based on time taken to solve mock paper, no. of sums solved, correct and wrong answers, variations of the sum understood and not understood.
Social Part: Community, Peer Help, Competitions and Games.
Information Architecture
This consumes the most time as organising features into categories and seeing what could be done how is a concern. I kept going back and forth from this and Task Flows, and had a lot of iterations and back and forth with the stakeholders.
Decisions taken and Rationale
Mock Paper: The practise tab could contain the topics as well as mock papers. A separate menu could be there for correcting your worksheet as a user will solve a worksheet on pen and paper and directly login to the webapp again, hence correct worksheet should be easily available. Then I decided to directly make the Mock Paper available.
All Chapters: In the old UI, All chapters was a menu. However, keeping it accessible from the menu bar was not required as the frequency someone would need to go to topics is not as high, and there is already an explore section inside the home page for 'recommended topics'. Thus, keeping topics inside practise makes sense as topics are already there in form of continue learning.
Insights Tab: Earlier, I had planned to put this in the profile section where your profile page could be like a dashboard. However, this needed to be more accessible on priority. The Insights tab should function like a report card / dashboard with actionable insights - pushing them in subjects they're not strong in. This does not fit in home page where we have continue learning and exploring other chapters. There could be a push for chapters in a different way on the home page. Best way to keep give it it's importance is to give it a separate tab.
Task Flows
To understand how a feature would work without looking at already existing examples, a combination of lo-fid prototypes, task flows and information architecture goes simultaneously.
Old Mock Paper Feature Task Flow
There was 2 problems with this task flow
There was no way to evaluate a mock paper after closing the laptop. How will the computer know which mock paper I'm uploading my answers for if i refresh the tab?
The task flow was too big, and this whole mock paper could be turned into a separate tab itself. Apart from that, separating evaluate and generate would be a better idea.
New UI Mock Paper Feature
Making a separate Menu to break the flow has helped cut out the confusions.
Taking them directly to the analysis of the answers once they upload it would be a good flow.
Evaluation of mock paper
Step Assist - Learning through Assessment
As a constraint was MCQ itself, I came up with an innovative method called "Step Assist". With this method, user is learning while doing the quiz. They solve it step by step, instead of directly selecting the answer. Thinking through how a feature would work with flows and then with UI iterations.
Giving feedback in the end would lead to various nuances like options given from the backend and more, and it was better to get immediate feedback than in the end. So I changed the feedback mechanism.
I worked on it further and made them get clues on steps. They get hints, XP and explanations as well. I detailed it out completely as to what would happen in the sequence. This answers important questions like
how will gamification work? How do we provide explanation to students?
Old vs New Learning Plan Flow
All changes highlighted in Dark Blue, that would change in the next flow.
Entry: Earlier, I decided that learning plan should go from home -> practise menu itself, however later I shifted it to a button. Later I shifted that to accessing it from the sidebar which will have the plan.
The contents inside the learning plan was yet to be thought of.
Practising Weak Subjects
Practising Chapter You Know
Community Feature
UI Iterations
Insights Screen
Home Page
Quiz - Correct Answer in Step Assist
Final Outcome
Landing Page
Home Page
Chapters Directory
Levels Inside Chapters
Learning Plan AI Generated
Generate Worksheet
Insights on Solved Worksheet
Explanation of correct answers
Global Insight Cards
QnA Page