Auditorium - LxD case study
Overview
Type of project Self Initiated
Duration 8 Hours
Role Worked Alone
Tools Research, Interview, Paper wireframes, Figma
After encountering the fascinating world of LxD (Learning experience Design), I decided to challenge myself with an 8-hour assignment trying to find a solution to one of the most common patterns that exist in the LxD world - users sign up for a course but don't finish it after a set amount of effort and time. The reasons they don't finish this can depend on (Intrinsic) motivation, external factors, the content, or the way it's presented to them.
For most LxD providers, it is hard to measure why users drop out and how to better the learning experience and improve completion rates. Besides completing the course it's also important to measure if users understood what they learned and know how to incorporate their new knowledge or skills in their everyday or professional lives.
Having taken part in a few online and self-learning courses myself in the past few years I was excited to dive into research about this subject and see where design thinking will get me
Scope and constraints
With work and school still remote or hybrid, online and self-learning courses continue to grow in popularity amongst individuals wanting to learn new skills, companies onboarding new employees, and helping existing employees grow and learn. Keeping the user's engagement is crucial for both the user and the platform's success. Soft skills like learning how to give a good presentation are rarely taught in schools and are often essential in one's professional career regardless of the competence they have in their field of work.
In this case study, I wanted to see what solution I can suggest as a UX UI designer for a self-learning app aimed at professionals that offers soft skills courses. For content, I used Udemy's "Presentation Skills Secrets: Delivering the Talk of Your Life".
My biggest focus in this assignment was ideating solutions based on the research I did, coming up with a LoFi prototype for the part of the flow I incorporated my solution to, and finally designing some HiFi screens to show the look and feel of the app.
How might we reduce the rate of online course drop-outs who experience low motivation from learning alone?
Research
I started by conducting some general research about LxD, reading material from lxd.org and more,
downloaded self-learning apps such as Skillbase, Coursera, Skillshare, and Duolingo and browsed web-based learning platforms.
In order to come up with questions for my interview
For the process of this assignment, I’ve conducted an interview with a friend who started a new job and had to go through an onboarding which included many online courses.
I asked her about her experience with online courses she does for fun, for work, and for school, focusing on what motivates and demotivates her.
Scope & Constraints
The timeline for this project was 5 days. Because I worked with an existing app, one of my major challenges was figuring out where in the app the feature would be. As a Spotify user who uses the app and desktop platforms daily I didn’t want the karaoke party feature to be on the main page in a way that would interrupt the daily use, but I also didn't want to hide it too deep where users wouldn't know how to get to it. Keeping that in mind I decided to place the feature in the “profile” page since it only has a few features on it and because your user name would be an important part of the karaoke feature.
The biggest challenge of this project was trying to design a feature that would use technology that has not yet been invented (or at least used by Spotify), in a way that would be easy for users to figure out while also staying in line with Spotify’s aesthetic and loved features (playlists and recommendations for example).
Process
After gathering the data from my research I started by creating use cases and conducting task analysis, looking at the task analysis I established that I would need 2 types of users to create a party - the host and the participant. I started ideating and thinking of the 2 flows. I sketched a paper prototype to create the 2 user flows starting at the home page of Spotify, creating the party or joining in, searching for and adding songs to the queue, opening your microphone and singing along and also a pop up informing you when you’re about to leave the party.
Outcomes & Lessons
Since this was a theoretical assignment the outcome of this project was a prototype and the last step was to conduct user testing which was quite successful. The users I tested understood the process of creating a karaoke party through the app, how to add new songs to the queue, and how it would work if the technology was available.
Overall I am very pleased with the UX I produced and wish I could collaborate with engineers to see if it’s possible to use a phone’s microphone as a karaoke microphone that could send over sound to the same outsource that would play it all together. If the project were to be fulfilled the next ideas I’d test would be adding an option to record and gamification of hitting the notes while singing.