DropClass
Education in Pandemic Times — Case Study
Extreme situations demand extreme challenges. Wicked problems require a deep understanding of all people involved, and an innovative approach to find possible solution. The thinking process has to change from linear to circular. But thank God we’ve got the power provided by Design Thinking. In this Case Study, I’m going to describe the process me and my team went through to create a possible solution for the struggles students are facing with the change in the educational format: from physical to virtual.
Challenges
- Identify the struggles students are facing with remote study
- Find a possible solution for a main pain point: APP or Service
Meet the Squad ❤
At first, we we’re still defining some roles to divide and conquer. With time, we could see what each one had to bring to the process. The communication went smooth and we learned a lot from the challenge, and from each other.
My role
- Conduct interviews
- Gather and analyse data
- Desk research
- Conducting concept test with users
Who is the protagonist?
Education is one of the main affected areas with this pandemic situation. Schools are seeing remote learning as the most effective option to follow up with the agendas. Still, students are struggling to adapt to the new formats.
The process
Empathy time: User Research
We’ve started with an online survey because quantitative studies are run with a much larger volume of participants and it gave us more representative of the population as a whole. To help us coming up more effective questions, we’ve used the Lean Survey Canvas tool.
The Lean Survey Canvas gave us a better understanding of the scenario, but still, we had some things to clarify and others to confirm. We’ve moved then to the interviews to get a closer contact with the users.
Given the situation, interviews were conducted remotely, which for us, didn’t compromised the results. A script was designed to help guiding us, but the questions changed over the process. The next step was to gathered and analysed the new results.
Definition of the problem
Affinity Diagram method, which consist in a method used to organize many ideas into groups with common themes or relationships, helped us to confirm and refute hypotheses, and get new insights about the struggles our interviewed users were facing.
To help guiding us to find the best definition of the problem we were going to aim, we’ve brainstormed using How Might We..? technic trying to aim as many problems as we got among the ones that appeared as patterns. Then, we narrowed to one main goal: Provide the material are currently lacking from school.
Personas
With our goal defined, we got back to our surveys and interviews findings to define our Personas to display the needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns of our target audience.
Putting ourselves in the shoes of our 3 personas through an Empathy Map was the next step on the process of really understanding the scenario from their point of view. It helped us a lot to clarify the place of speaking out users were.
Ideation state of mind
Now we have a better image of our users and their goals and needs, it is time to start thinking about solutions! With such short time, we picked one of my favorites tools from Design Thinking: Brainstorming. We set a time for us to think in as many options as we could to solve the main pain point using an online canvas.
Narrowing the options through voting, we decided to go forward with tree main ideas that we summarised in 3 concepts.
Time to test! After testing the 3 concepts with users, we’ve ended up with new insights about our process itself. We were targeting too broad at this stage, so we had to take a step back. After analysing the results and discuss in group, we decided to choose one main persona to target, and the concept that better suits its needs to be developed.
Prototyping the concept
With the concept chosen, we felt the need to go through our defined persona’s User Journey to understand their present journey to give us more substantial insight of specific problems and opportunities to work on.
Finally, after highlighting pain points, we came up with a more clear prototype of what we could deliver to our user.
Dropclass is a mobile application where students can overcome the education & knowledge transfer troubles. Here, students will find academic content in various formats from documents, to video & audio. On top of the provided content, students will also be able to rely on an academic community, meant for further knowledge sharing and doubt clarification, curated by certified teachers and professionals. For easy access to what matters the most, any saved piece of content will be easily reachable through a self organising library, where all relevant content to the student will be kept, safe & tidy.
Taking a step ahead!
We felt that some great ideas left behind were worthy to be considered to a next step of the product. This part is dedicated and fit for the younger student. This section meant for the younger audience, approaches education with a lighter, more interactive and fun take with a pinch of gamification.
Conclusion
I couldn’t be happier and more grateful fot this opportunity of working through this process with such an amazing team! It was indeed an intense week for everybody, but the gains are immeasurable. I had the chance to use new tools and methods in a more practical way, which made me also analyse some points I still have to work on as well as strong points I didn’t now I had. Listening yo different points of view has widened my mind in a way that I few like a new person somehow.
