STUDENT COMMUNITY CHAT APP
Lead Designer
August – December 2017 (4 months)
Objective: Create a chat app in the Classroom Platform to help drive student engagement.
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH
Student Journey
Working with the Research team, we discovered a typical student journey matched that of a gym membership. Students would start off eager and excited to take on the program. But without any social engagement feedback loop, students lose motivation and reprioritize life events over the program. Eventually, unsubscribing from Udacity.
This highlighted an opportunity to help students retain their learns through social engagement.
Platform Constraints
Because the chat application was to be build on top of our Classroom platform - we had to consider what the current experience was like and how the existing services interacted with each other.
An opportunity revealed itself to consolidate the other communication channels and simplify the student experience with our chat application.
HYPOTHESIS
Community cannot be manufactured. At the core, engagement has to focus on helping students unblock themselves on their learning paths.
DESIGN CYCLES
User Flows
I collaborated with engineers and our PM to ensure that what we had envisioned could operate on top of the existing platform and would address pain-points that cross-functional partners were struggling with.
Wireframes
Our team went through rounds of user-testing; sitting down with our students to validate the who/what/where/why/how of our product.
KEY FEATURES
The final deliverable: The conversations had to be in context to the work that the students were going through. We created an ecosystem that would promote engagement in the form of self-help by community. Students coming along side others on the exact same step of the learning paths as themselves to push through to the finish line together.
LONG TERM VISION
Success has to be measured by not only impact but longevity. As the chat application was starting to gain traction across all the Nanodegree programs, our team was tasked to develop a 2 year road map for all social related products. Key steps that our team took in order to accomplish this included:
1. Aligning business and user needs
2. Identifying the Udacity ecosystem
3. Strategizing inclusive product ideas
Diagrams used for company all-hands vision shareout. More details of vision for social product roadmap available upon request.
Project Responsibilities: User Research, interviews, testing; Product Strategy; Wireframes & High fidelity Mockups; Design Direction and Facilitation for Direct Reports