Innovating Live Learning Features for 2 Million People

Being the leading IELTS online practice tests provider, their platform needs to constantly produce high-quality content for their users. The goal being to bring more traffic, improve retention, and increase both lead generation and conversion rate. My role was to lead the development of the Live Lesson feature for the IELTS Online Tests (IOT) web app.

A huge number of requests from users showed that there was a high demand for more in-depth learning, exam tips and consultations from IELTS experts. As an initial solution, lessons were live-streamed on their Facebook page. However, as these livestream sessions became more and more popular, and limited in its integration capacity, a better system was needed to keep up with rising demand.

Even though the Facebook livestream sessions were received incredibly well, I distilled several key pain points through further user interviews. Mainly:

1. Being unable to register for lessons in advance made it unlikely that they would save the date (even though they would want to attend).

2. Difficulty in finding the lesson on Facebook due to abundant noise on the Facebook page itself.

3. And no clear visual indication on what topics the live lessons would be covering.

If IOT was going to meet this new demand for live lessons, not only would they have to solve certain user frustrations, but they could also take the opportunity to grow their business even more. I identified three potential areas for growth:

1. By directing traffic to the web app, it could result in more registered users.

2. Registered user information can be analysed to increase lead generation.

3. By strengthening user engagement and building brand trust, it potentially increases the likelihood of purchasing IOT's other products and services.

With more than 64.000+ visitors per day on average, IELTS Online Tests is the leading web app for online IELTS practice. Based on my user research, the most important goals for IOT users are:

Furthermore, many users are interested in information and guidance on studying abroad, finding jobs overseas and immigration to English-speaking countries. My research also showed that the participants on IOT's Facebook livestream sessions indicated the content as useful, highly valuable and expressed demand for more frequent sessions on a variety of topics.

With the company's core business of study abroad admissions, the business requirement was to have more registered users complete their profile in order to sort and target potential customers. I decided to include the sign up process in the user flow. However, I also convinced the stakeholders to let the users complete building their profile at a later stage by showing them how much more friction it would cause, which could discourage them from joining future lessons.

Through interviews with the Director of Operations and the Curriculum Manager, discussing the business requirements and constraints, we came up with the content strategy for the live lessons. ‍ The 4 skills of the IELTS tests: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking also became the 4 main categories of lessons. Sub-categories included 2 types of tests: Academic and General Training. Vocabulary deserved to have its own category too as it is one of the most requested topics. Accordingly, these lessons would be hosted by the IELTS tutors and experts. ‍ On the other hand, any information regarding study abroad, overseas careers, and specific industries, IOT would invite representatives from institution partners to offer their insights. Lessons in different languages (eg. Chinese, Arabic, etc.) would be produced for specific user groups.

One of the versions of the wireframe includes a video on how this works as the hero background. After conducting user testing with the low-fi prototype, I realised that the current user group were confused that this is the homepage of the website since both screens now have a very similar pattern. Plus, even though the idea of a video seems visually pleasing, it was an unnecessary element since it didn't add much value to a non-complex feature. That's why I decided to remove the video element and shift important content higher to capture user attention faster.

With the goal of making things easier for the users as well as the internal team, we brought the once-per-week Facebook webinars to IOT's official website alongside IELTS related products and services. Users could easily find everything about IELTS practices, including IELTS recent tests and mock-up tests, in a single place! Being able to view all the upcoming lessons, as well as previous ones, gives them the option to plan and schedule lessons they are interested in advance.

To make this into a recorded learning experience, I came up with My Live Lessons, where users can easily keep track of all the lessons they have signed up for and chart their attendance.

By sending both a confirmation email upon registration, as well as a reminder 15 minutes before their registered live lesson, we could reduce the no-show rate for users who simply 'forgot about it'. In addition, pairing this with existing personalised IELTS Analytics on the web app, users can track their performance and take ownership their progress.

Initially, live lessons were one-time webinars that aired, and users would be able to watch most of them for free. However, once the lesson was over, it would no longer be available for viewing. ‍ But how about the users who found out just a little too late? After discussing with the team, we decided to offer replays of those live lessons to every registered user. By doing this, the business provides upfront user benefits which helps to establish trust organically. More so, through these live lessons, IOT can gain a better understanding of its users' interests and behaviours for future developments. ‍ What about users who just arrived at the site, saw a live lesson they’re interested in but it's already live in the last 10 minutes? Instead of going through the entire registration and confirmation process, we granted immediate access to the live lessons as a direct solution.

When it came to choosing which lessons to join, my research showed that users wanted recommendations regarding what's popular and what's important (mainly to achieve a higher IELTS score). So I dedicated the top space of the Live Lesson listing page for Popular Live Lessons. To do this, we simply used user data to determine popularity. As for what's important, I had the academic team hand-pick valuable modules that they believed had high educational value.

Since this was going to be a new feature on IOT and many existing users might not notice its appearance, I decided to bring the Popular Lessons to the homepage, right under the hero background. The heatmap results showed that users paid attention to this section and often click directly on the Join button.

After discussing with the stakeholders, we decided to help users easily recognise category of each lesson by applying clear visual indicators. Utilising IOT's existing brand colours, four of which were dedicated to skills in IELTS exams (Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking), while the fifth was applied for general usage, we felt that this was an important touch to bring the entire design together.

Coming from a platform where users can practice IELTS tests to get the automatic results and corrections immediately, seeing tutors presenting live lessons as frequent as 3 lessons per week is a big step in connecting IOT with its users. I wanted to keep this connection coherent throughout the UX writing. On top of it, even though this is an academic platform, everything doesn't have to be so stiff. To illustrate the brand's belief that learning can be fun too, I decided to bring in the emojis! 😜

One of the very first visible results since launching the Live Lesson feature was the huge increase in traffic to the web app. With the lessons becoming more frequent, and with an increased diversity of topics and speakers, we saw an increase in the number of registered users as well as more user profiles (aka. the lead generation questionnaire) being completed. ‍ On average, 200–300 participants attended each live lesson, and coincidentally, there was also an increase in the direct purchase of IELTS related services on IOT. Though this was not a significant increase, the constant steady number of participants and user feedback shows that this feature truly benefited them. ‍ Just like any other project, there is always something I could learn from it and here is one: ‍ Nothing lasts forever (it probably shouldn't anyway) After completing the protect in 2019, I recently went back to have a look at the current site, including this feature, and realised that there were a few more developments to it after my departure -- some that I could agree on and some that I would challenge. But just like everything else, the product has to change, more quickly and often than not and it's a great thing about technology and design. I don't own the product nor the feature I once designed. What I did was contribute to the development and the growth of it, but it's now out into the world and my hope is that the users will always be the driving force of its development down the road.