Learning app
End-to-end process
B2B
2023
Project overview
Minders is a startup providing professional educators with tools to help course participants maximize their learning.
When I joined, the company was developing a mobile app for learning experiences (LXP) to prevent knowledge decay from expensive courses. They want to create learning journeys with high engagement and completion rates using spaced repetition, active, and social learning. By focusing on social elements and critical thinking Minders sets itself apart from competitors.
I was tasked with the end-to-end design process of the complete app following a tight roadmap.
Course participants
forget
75% in a week
This is especially true of complex information delivered in long, passive learning sessions. Interviews with customers supported they struggle to ensure course participants retain learned knowledge. Course participants expressed that “life takes over” and that finding time to practice between physical sessions and after a course is difficult.
Eventually, this results in costly knowledge getting lost.
Designing spaced-repitition for bite-sized learning
Course participants needed a learning structure that fit their busy schedules while reinforcing learning. To support this, I designed learning journeys using spaced repetition, a proven method to combat memory decay. The learning journeys were a series of activities combining short texts, images, or videos and ended with interactive engagements to support active learning.
This gave participants flexibility, allowing them to complete tasks during short breaks in their day and reinforcing learning without overwhelming them.
Avoiding endless flows
In an early iteration of the design flow each activity had a primary and a secondary action with the primary action prompting the user to begin the next activity and the secondary exiting to journey overview. This (of course) resulted in users continuing to the next activity. This caused to issues:
Before
After
Designing interactive features that drive user engagement and retention
I designed a range of interactive features that encouraged course participants to stay actively engaged with the content and made learning fun and personalized. Course participants were encouraged to relfect on and share what they learned, helping to reinforce their learnings.
By designing diverse engagement types I ensured that learning is active and varied, and kept users motivated.
Users were uncertain if they were sharing with buddies
I knew the designs were shipped too fast, and I was particularly concerned about the buddy engagement. During testing (in production), users responded positively to the buddy engagement as a feature and the variety in engagement types emphasizing some requiring less mental effort and others requiring deep reflection. However, some users were uncertain if their answers were being shared with others or kept private in their journals. Adding to the confusion, there were technical issues with lagging messages in the buddy chat.
This issue was cemented further when I did a co-design workshop, where most groups focused their work on the buddy engagement flow.
Diversifying buddy and journal engagement.
To resolve the lagging messages and the uncertainty around buddy vs. journal engagements, I kept both engagements within the activity screen avoiding the buddy chat altogether. I gave the engagements the same format but with distinct colors and labels making it easily distinguishable and accessible. Instead of using the minders bot message to confirm to the user where the answers are saved, I used a snack bar. A snack bar that is colored and moving is more likely to catch attention.
As a bonus, they could now see the activity content while typing with only a scroll, and the issue was resolved within a single sprint.
