The Orbit - UX Case Study

The Orbit is a concept of an innovative interactive education system. It has a dominance over the conventional educational systems as it puts more weight on thinking and reaching own self-explanatory conclusions with the interactive lessons and exercises.

In Orbit, all the students are given individual attention and hence they understand their subjects in a more practical way. The role of a teacher here is just to guide them in the right way and provide them with learning opportunities. What really happens is that the individual discovers his own learning capacity and success depends on the thinking ability of the student.

The classroom activities might be similar to what is being practised in a public school where students go and get their notes and submit records but the key difference is that here in the Orbit classes, students can get better understand of their lessons with interactive study material and exercises, they are encouraged to bring about their personal thoughts and visions. Students enrol themselves in different forums and groups where they get to discuss many points on the same topic and get different views. The teachers here contribute so much as to turn every discussion into a positive note cooperating with the students.

This strategy makes students self-determining, reliable and indulgent. It also improves the relationship between the teacher and students and brings a warm classroom atmosphere. Such a harmonious atmosphere can create masterminds who, in the long run, can become assets not only to the school but to the society as a whole.

The work starts with a phase of investigation and understanding of the challenge. I collect all kind of information about the company, competitors, benchmarks, analogues, and the potential or actual customers.

The Value Proposition Canvas defines the first step that telling users exactly what you do, and promising them good value.When a user lands on the application, you’ve got about five seconds to convince them why you are worth their time. New users are always looking for quick answers. Like:

Who are you?

What do you do?

How will I benefit from your service/site/app?

The principles of Value Proposition Canvas creation is quite simple: identify your customer ‘pains’, ‘jobs’ and ‘gains’. The goal of creating your canvas is to learn how to match your product features and the value you offer to your customers.

With the Lean UX Graph, we face the design of the product as a business problem, investigating what problems we can face and generating hypotheses that we can later test.

Hypotheses 1: Students will take more interest in their subjects if it’s presented in an interesting way and live mentor support also needed.

Hypotheses 2: Students like to share their thoughts and queries if they find an easy way to involve others and discuss their thoughts.

Now it is time to get to know the users, test the hypotheses and find out what are the needs of the potential users.

I will use three different channels to empathise and get to know the users: Competitors Comparison, Surveys and Interviews.

Checking out the competitors is a must since they give us an idea of ​​what is working, and they will give us information about the users behaviours and interactions.

In addition to the competitors, it is important to find more ways to explore our potential users.

In this project, analyzing the social networks we will find large amounts of information of users and their needs at no cost.

To give an example, we have student communities of ‘Khan Academy’ and ‘Duolindo’ with around 30,00,000 followers on Facebook, with a high index of posts and interactions per day.

The Surveys were made in Google Forms, easy to make and to send to people. There were 83 people answering the survey.

Profile: 6-12th class students who prefer online and digital study material.

For the interviews in this project, I elaborated open questions regarding:

The learning experience with digital content.

Advantages and disadvantages of digital classrooms.

What they would like to find in an app for students, extra features.

Both surveys and interviews are essential for good research.While surveys allow us to approach more people at a lower cost, interviews allow us to investigate deeper into those aspects that interest us and discover new features or contributions that were not originally raised.

From the information, I already got from user research through interviews and surveys and our previous research in competitors and social networks, it is time to order and synthesise this information to find insights and patterns.

The affinity diagram, which basically consists of grouping data by similarities, allow us to see trends and especially when its come to large number of information it’ll be essential for a group it in blocks to be able to give meaning and later work with the information.

Interesting study material.

Discussion forum.

Get help.

Time-table and calendar

I find a new functionality that I will explore thanks to the interviews:

The inclusion of a Time-table and CALENDAR that show the events, competitions and other activities.

This is agood example of how user research can give you new insights into what the user needs. In the interviews some ideas popped out:

Having a very visual calendar.

The concept of daily school diary.

Prizes and rewards

Other relevant findings from the research are:

Students would like to see their study material in an exciting way like animated, video or interactive: we confirm the hypothesis.

Some students want to discuss their thoughts with a bigger group and others want one on one discussion.

While studying through the digital study material, students would like to have personal mentor support to guide them in the right direction.

A student would like to know about his progress, area of improvement, mentor’s suggestion and achievements.

So the research approves me some functionalities:

Classroom: Having all subject’s study material.

Chat: Discuss thoughts with individual or group.

Dashboard: To see the progress and achievements.

Mentor’s support: Personal mentor support.

Calendar: For time-table, to-do list and other events.

Once everything is concreted, it is time to design the flows, then the wireframes and after testing them.

The user flows allows us to see all the routes that users can take inside the app.

The wireframes are the visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of the app. Once they are made I make theminteractive with Adobe XD to test it with users.

After user testing I designed the User Interface. You can see below how I worked on the different sections.