Summary
The organisation had been running an empowerment program to allow teachers advocate use of Edtech platform among other teachers while sharing their expertise and other learning to remain updated with 21st century teachings. Since, its inception business didn't had proper visibility on the events run by teachers except for the ground team who reported manually. We wanted to make the events related to professional development of teachers discoverable and encourage more teachers to organise and participate in them.
After launching the digital solution in form of a gamified event management app, the visibility of such events were boosted by >80%, confidence on the available data was boosted by >55%, with 40% reduction in margin-of-error and the number of organised events increased by more than 4x times.
Challenge
The Company didn't have any clear visibility on onground programme's performance which posed a challenge in measuring effectiveness and impact of the products too. The accessibility to those programmes were also reported to be very poor as lesser number of participants were being reported to have been turning up. The number of events being conducted had no precise data. The participants received certificates of appreciation manually through mail within 2 days to 1 month of the event leaving some not so pleased. It was a time-consuming and redundant work performed by single individual weekly basis, from several years.
Solution Overview
A solution platform that empowers teachers to grow professionally by:
1. Allowing them easy access to various type of learning opportunities that they can participate
2. Enabling them to plan and/or publish their activities
3. Rewarding and recognising them for participating in activities through digital certificates
Design Process
When we started with research and exploration of problem space most of the members displayed the habit of leading the users through questions rather than being exploratory. We were not able to do face-to-face interviews even as there were school holidays so, we arranged a tele-interview with 20 teachers. After the first round of interview, I saw the problem so, during the debriefing session gave a demo of how to interview, and as I was new to them so, I had to be careful about how I was commuting the knowledge without letting them feel being corrected. It was something new for me to do. After the 3rd round of interview, I observed some of the interviewers improved really well and the user insights were more qualitative and unique.
Solution(s)
Usability testing showed that users were struggling to adapt to the new way of participating or organising events through app. We decided to change the way information was displayed and introduced a dashboard for quick access to all events as well as notable features like earning badges and certificate.
We conducted additional usability testing with the same tasks and our new design, which showed an increase in findability compared to the previous round of testing. Users were able to adjust their notification settings, which gave them access to new event alerts.
Metrics
The app was among the top 3 on Google playstore in Malaysia region, under events category, for the first entire quarter of beta launch and the downloads crossed 10,000 by first month, with relatively limited marketing efforts in comparison to other in-house apps that we had launched till date. The launch of the app immediately boosted visibility of events and crossed our expected target mark of 1000 per month ongoing sessions to 2000+ with 900 identifiable organisers which was a hopping 150% than the record we earlier had.
The data shown here is derived from the analytics after 3 months of beta launch
My learnings
1. Leading a team of 10 through Design Thinking and Agile process while navigating through the twists and turns of real time problem solving.
2. Defining and driving a complete brand strategy independently from grounds up through numerous iterations and tackling push backs from stakeholders while proposing solutions.
3. Tackling adhoc requests and develop the ability to see the resulting patterns in a solution framework that could merge into an ongoing project or fork from one.
I can walk you through more details and how the solutions enabled other core products, if we get on a call.