Enhancing the Eckovation app — a UX case study
Challenge
The Eckovation is a social learning platform that provides world-class curriculum and expert-educators for upgrading the skills of learners. The curriculum is created considering different segments of end-users — be it from urban or rural areas, professional aspirants, college grads or primary school students. We specifically have three types of end-users, categorizing them as — Content Creators[Educators], Content Consumers[Learners] & Monitors[Parents/Mentors]
When we started this project, we came up with a set of product goals that the new app should meet. From these product goals, we filtered down to the following design goals.
- Improve navigation throughout the app: Users should be quickly able to switch between primary destinations of the App.
- Easy access to all category courses: When the user accesses our App, he comes with the goal to upgrade his skills in a particular field or to explore the courses that we are providing and to choose from them as per his skills.
- Make it easy for the learner to get access to Enrolled Courses: Once the user had bought the course he becomes a learner for the Eckovation. Accessing the enrolled course for learner should be trouble-free.
- Improve the UX and provide aesthetic feel at the same time: Providing a rich, engaging and delightful experience to the user.
- Make app design scalable: We have to do it in such a way that the user need not relearn how to use the product and get accustomed to future integrations
The Happy Path
For the new user: Plans to upgrade his skills → Opens the Eckovation App → Explore Courses → Buy Course → Start Learning.
For the learner: Learning a course → Opens the Eckovation App → My Enrolled course → Continue Learning.
User Research
The research data was collected via internal stakeholders, feedback emails, support calls and through our learners.
Wireframes
After gathering all the requirements I started fresh with the Architecture of Eckovation App through which I created wireframes and site map. It helped me to get to the breadth and depth of the app.
Goal 1: Improve navigation throughout the app
The goal was to branch the primary destinations of the app into bottom navigation. It allows the new user to explore the entire app and figure out where the features are located. And to the learner, it helps to switch between actions effortlessly.
The default primary action in navigation allows the user to explore all the online courses provided by Eckovation. But after doing the A/B testing, we had to branch Groups as the default primary action as every feature is centered around Groups.
Goal 2: Easy access to all category courses
This feature is already present in the existing product, so all we did was improvised it further. In the explore screen we added features where the user could access featured courses (personalized data), combo courses, free courses, and featured groups.
Goal 3: Make it easy for the learner to get access to Enrolled courses
In the old version of Eckovation app learner has to join the group to access the enrolled course. This flow soon became a hurdle for the learner when he enrolled in many groups.
The group feature allows the learner to access the feed, quiz, and other plugins. It helps the learner to clear their doubts and ask questions.
A separate section for the enrolled courses is introduced to solve this issue, which we termed as My Course through which learner can resume learning anytime without any distractions and doubt. This created a huge impact on learners due to easy access to their enrolled courses
The other issue was many members of the team were in favor of displaying each course from the combo class as an individual course. We had a huge discussion and where I convinced them that we shouldn’t be doing it in such a way. It will not only affect our business goals but will also become a big hurdle for the learner. The learner subscribed for the parent course and when he’ll get to see so many child courses being mixed up with the other course, it will become a painful task for him to identify the courses.
Goal 4: Improve the UX and provide the aesthetic feel at the same time
While working on the revamp main goal was to improve the user experience in every aspect and provide aesthetically pleasing design at the same time because people often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
We wanted to ship something that is fresh and provides a rich, engaging and delightful experience.
Goal 5: Make app design scalable
We already have a large number of audience who is using our product so, while doing the revamp I had to keep it in mind. I had to do it in such a way that learner need not relearn how to use the product and to make every step predictable.
UX Writing
I wrote and designed some microcopies(a little piece of text on the interface) for empty states which can help the audience to navigate and do stuff. It shows care and understanding about our feelings at every step of the user flow.
Reflection and Learning
Redesigning the Eckovation app was a very special project for me as it was my first big task after joining Eckovation. I was excited to give it a new and useable interface. It is light years ahead in UX/UI when compared to the old Eckovation App.
Working on this project, I got to engage in brainstorming and reach a conclusion, collaborating with the developers at each step. One important learning was taking design critique positively because at the end you are going to come up by creating something that is delightful and usable by the audience.
In term of the success metrics, the overall engagement number got increased and NSP rating is improved.
Our next steps include working on improving existing features and further integrate them into Android.
Thanks to Apoorv Mishra, Parveen Yadav, and Himanshu Ahuja
