CampCademy, An Online Workshop Camp — Case Study
From in-person to online
This week brief came from a fictional educational company that currently offers in-person courses for adults of languages, music, yoga, cooking, and first-aid. Their main attraction is workshop camps that integrate classes, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching people additional skills. Our main challenge was to design an engaging online experience for people who cannot attend the workshop camp.
The Project
Challenge
- creating an online learning platform that will transform the in-person learning experience into a 100% digital experience for adults
Teamwork makes the dreamwork: The mixed bag of nuts
Duration: 4 days + presentation
My role:
- Conduct interviews
- Desk research
- Conduct tests with users
- Wireframes and prototype design
The protagonist
Meet Joana!
Our process
We kicked off by creating our initial CSD matrix to gather all the information we’ve had at that moment from the brief and our first assumptions and doubts. Then, we’ve jumped on a research to understand better what was the current scenario for online learning, what was already being offered, and what the market was lacking. At this point, we needed to focus on one of the course topics offered by the camp to narrow our information to one concept that later became a prototype to be tested. After discussing a little, we’ve decided to go for languages and analyzed 4 popular language APP’s.
The next step was to conduct a survey and interviews to find out:
- if people were interested in learning new language skills
- if people were willing to engage in an online language course
- what were the blockers preventing people from engaging and keeping up with the courses
- what people could miss in an online environment that is provided for an in-person one
- what makes the learning process engaging and fun
Gathering the results and analyzing them through an Affinity Diagram to see patterns showed us that:
- 🆒 86% wants to learn a new language
- 📲 73% would take an online course to learn a new language
- ⏱ Time management, not appealing courses on the market and no interest in formal education are blockers that prevent people from taking a course to learn a new language
- 📈 Most wants to learn for career progression and travelling
- 🗓🧑🏻🏫 Support from teachers, real-time interaction with peers and teachers and a setup routine are things people would miss from in-person courses
- 🎮 Gamification, competing with yourself and others, sense of humor and connection to reality are factors that make learning engaging and fun
The research step confirmed that what is lacking and what people want and need is a learning platform combining Fun + Social, with access to professionals, which all of these apps lacked.
Define step
At this point, we needed to narrow our objective to start the Ideation step. The How might we…? method helped us to define our challenge:
Ideation step
Before we jumped to the ideation concept brainstorming, we’ve done a User Journey to get some more insights from the present scenario of our user.
Concept Sketching
📅 Users can browse our courses and choose which one they want to attend. Then, pick whether the part-time, full time or weekend program and which cohort to join — everything for more flexibility.
📒During the weekdays, they’ll have short lessons to complete individually in order to prepare for the weekend course. Listen to dialogues as podcasts and in the end, complete an exercise which could be for example quizzes, fill-the-gaps, or word combinations.
👩🏽🏫 On the weekends, after a short introduction, they’re assigned to a group and then have short lessons given by a well-trained teacher through an interactive whiteboard and through voice chat with peers and teachers.
🙋🏼♀️🕹🙋🏻♂️ Beyond the classes, they are going to complete a mission through a fun, interactive game. In real-time, they communicate with peers via voice while going on a journey, completing small challenges in order to advance in the game. The challenges are different types of exercises, such as quizzes, charades, and conversations.
💌 At any time on weekdays or weekends, you can reach out to your teacher for help via the message center.
Before entering the Prototype step, we aimed at how users complete a lesson on a weekday in preparation for the weekend and then, created a site map and a user flow.
Prototype
After that, we created lo-fi wireframes and tested them, which showed that our user flow worked well.
Based on this, we finally made our mid-fi prototype, tested the flow again, and made a few smaller iterations.
And here’s our mid-fi prototype,
Key Learnings and Surprises
For my conclusion, I’m gonna highlight the amazing experience that was working with Amanda Norell 💕. The whole process was smooth and enriching in many, many ways. Working remotely and collaboration in distancing has been a challenge for all of us, but I couldn’t be happier and prouder of our results.
My main learning from this week was that: there's no such a thing as too much research. This is never too much! To create a good design you need to know the right questions and to get the right answers. Research is a crucial part of the process.
