Knew't
Educational community marketplace with event-planning features
ROLES:
UX Researcher
UX Designer
TIMELINE:
4 Sprints /
5 Weeks
TOOLS:
Sketch
Axure
The Challenge
Create an educational community marketplace with an event-planning platform that gives individuals with desirable skills or knowledge the ability to organize their own local events.
Design Process
Empathize
Identifying the Target Audience
Based on the research, the target users were defined as freelance experts who possess experience, skills, and knowledge, and are interested in sharing that knowledge with others. These experts come from varied backgrounds, but are often professional teachers looking to supplement their income, general hobbyists who have mastered their skills, or college grads looking for income opportunities. They are seen as entrepreneurs who are involved in every aspect of their business.
Exploring the Skill-Sharing Landscape
• The event-planning marketplace is already quite saturated with varying levels of comprehensive features that help organizers do everything from interacting with attendees, managing registration, booking venues, and planning space layouts.
• The freelance or e-teaching marketplace isn't as saturated, but there are still a number of strong competitors that provide tools and platforms for highly-trained instructors to share skills online.
•There are very few platforms that accommodate skill-sharers and learners equally in an online environment.
• There is a large gap in the marketplace for platforms that support instructors who want to plan in-person, local, educational events.
Exploring the Skill-Sharing Landscape
Nearly 90% of respondents preferred to teach their skills over several class sessions rather than at single session events.
The vast majority of respondents felt they had beginner to moderate levels of experience planning events.
Over 70% felt they had beginner to intermediate experience in marketing their work or events.
What Users Want and Need
Next it was time to talk to the skill-sharing experts to gain insights into their needs for planning educational events. My team and I conducted 11 interviews with skilled individuals who had either taught in a formal educational setting or currently had an interest in teaching in an in-person setting. We learned:
• They prefer to teach in person because it's easier to engage their students and receive feedback.
• Social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, is often used to promote their educational events.
• Instructors put a lot of time and effort into planning their educational events and need information like expected attendance and student skill-levels in order to continually adjust and update their curriculum.
• Instructors already use many different tools to plan their educational events, which creates a time-consuming and fragmented experience, taking them away from crafting their content.
• Instructors prefer to have a desktop website to do their planning because it allows them to easily see and navigate between tasks.
"How do I get information on what the experience was like from people? What is the feedback and how do I use that feedback to improve my curriculum?"
Define
Meet Julia
Professional by Day, Photography Instructor on the Weekend
The insights from the user interviews helped us formulate our persona, Julia. This helped keep the user's needs and motivations front and center throughout the design process.
Defining the Problem Space
It was important to carefully build the problem statement to make sure we fully understood the problem we would be solving for the users with our design.
Design Principles
The insights gathered from the user interviews also helped define our design principles which would be the pillars of our design and would help ensure that the final product would best serve the users.
Taking Empathy to the Next Level
Because we were designing for a broad base of users who had very specific needs and desires for their educational event planning activities, we chose to create an empathy map to help further define and gain a deeper understanding of the users' thoughts, motivations, goals, and pain points.
Ideate
Brainwriting
My team and I used a brain-writing technique where we divided pages into quarters and set the timer for a couple minutes and then passed our page to the next person, kind of like musical chairs. This allowed us to build onto others' ideas to ultimately imagine things that we wouldn't have if we were just brainstorming individually.
Organizing Ideas
Afterwards, we each explained our ideas and began to organize them into three key areas for our design.
Prototype
What If We….
Once we produced many, many different ideas, we narrowed them down into three different concepts and built wireframes with which we would then use to test both the desirability and the usability levels with users.
Test
Will These Features Really Meet the Users' Needs?
From the Desirability / Usability Tests We Learned:
• Overall the concepts were well-received and users found each of the flows to be intuitive and simple to use.
• Users were sometimes confused about how to move onto the next steps after finishing a task, and didn’t like having to re-type information into separate flows.
• The way the venue search results were displayed made it easy to see and select the best options for their needs.Users liked the ability to schedule social media posts to several platforms at once.
But There Were Still a Few Things to Fix:
• Refine screen layouts and visual details throughout the product.
• Combine “Course Creation” and “Find a Venue” tasks into one flow.
• Update the site navigation architecture to make it less confusing and more intuitive.
So we got back to work and with these insights in mind, built the prototype for Knew't using Axure.
Outcomes
Presenting: Knew't!
Knew’t is an educational event planning tool to help skilled individuals spend less time planning, organizing, and promoting their in-person, local events, and more time building their content and interacting with their students.
Reflection
I was able to really strengthen and improve my research skills throughout this process. I spent a lot of time thinking about and talking through the project brief in order to define the market space and identify potential users, which helped understand the scope of this project. Additionally, a lot of time was spent crafting the problem statement, persona, and design principles. It was important to make sure these artifacts accurately reflected all of the research while also looking forward and defining the problem space in which we would begin to build a solution.
If I could go back and do something differently on this project, I think I would be more careful of trying to categorize the ideas produced during the Ideation phase too early. This may have boxed my team and I in too much too soon. It placed constraints on us while we were trying come up with really divergent ideas that could solve for our problem statement. In the future, I will be careful of structuring Ideation exercises too much while also ensuring that my team and I are moving toward our goals.
