Skillshare

Overview

PROBLEM

Skillshare is learning platform with thousands of prerecorded online classes taught by practitioners from across the world.

They have seen a growing demand for a virtual interactive tutoring experience and they want to offer interactive 121 tutoring option. They wanted to include the following new features:

Browse and select Tutors

See Tutor availability and book classes

Conduct Tutoring through the platform itself

MY ROLE

This was a collaborative project with three other designers.

I took the lead as the group facilitator. I also created the user survey, test script, prepared the design studios, site map and took forward part of the design from paper sketches to high fidelity.

We each conducted our own user interviews, user testing and synthesised our results.

DURATION

2 week design sprint

SOLUTION

Screener surveys: 13

User Interviews: 15

Design Iterations: 6 (2 in each Fidelity)

Usability Tests: 18

A clickable high fidelity prototype integrated seamlessly into the existing website to enable to the user to find a tutor, book and take a lesson with an expert.

TOOLS

IMPACT

Although this was a concept project, I would considered the following KPI's to measure success:

Conversion Rate from homepage

Task Success Rate

Number of tutor sessions booked

User Error Rate

Figma

Miro

Trello

Zoom

Slack

The Challenge

THE CLIENT

Skillshare is learning platform with thousands of prerecorded online classes taught by practitioners from across the world.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Browse and select Tutors

See Tutor availability and book classes

Conduct Tutoring through the platform itself

THE PROCESS

1

DISCOVER

2

DEFINE

3

DEVELOP

4

DELIVER

Screener Survey

User Interviews

Affinity Mapping

Competitor Analysis

Persona

Empathy Map

User Journey Map

Problem Statement

Site Map

Design Studio

Feature Prioritisation

User Flow

Sketches

Paper prototype

Usability Testing

Digital Wireframes

Iterations

Style Guide

Empty State

Final Designs

Next Steps

Discover

User Interviews | Competitor Analysis

WHAT ARE USERS SAYING

To start, we split the researching tasks. I worked creating the Survey, whilst my teammates worked on the Interview Script.

We surveyed 33 participants, and interviewed 15 people. Our key findings were:

73% of people would be interested in taking online classes in the future.

46% had private tuition online, and 37% had tuition in person.

People like the personalised approach of tuition, the idea of learning at their own pace and getting feedback, but have only been offered this during school years.

Tutor's experience, knowledge and personality are important.

Affinity map used to group key themes

WHAT ARE COMPETITORS DOING?

We conducted an analysis of Skillshare’s existing competitors in online learning platforms, and also their future competitors: online private tutors.

Our competitor analysis highlighted the following:

There was a clear lacking of 121 tuition with a professional focus. None of Skillshare’s direct competitors were offering this.

All private tuition targeted children, not adults.

Our hypothesis here is that there is an opportunity here to fill this gap. We wanted to ensure our designs emphasise the tutoring focus for adults. This also came up in our interview findings, where users only really had tuition at school, but are looking to improve skills in their professional life.

Define

Persona | Problem Statement | User Journey Map | User Flow

UNDERSTANDING OUR USER

From our research we created our Persona, Peter:

PETER'S PROBLEM STATEMENT

Peter needs a personalised way to overcome his specific animation problems because the current online videos are not customised to his unique learning needs.

USER JOURNEY MAP

To better understand Peter’s current approach to solving this problem, we made a user journey map to understand how he may go about learning a new skill and how he feels at each stage of the process:

Peter wastes time trying to find the specific information he requires to learn.

He struggles with the existing resources out there.

Information available really doesn’t answer his questions, and his learning comes to a halt.

HOW MIGHT WE'S

We developed two How Might We statements to find opportunities for design:

How might we make learning an interactive and engaging experience?

How might we help Peter find a reliable tutor who is an expert in the field?

OUR HYPOTHESIS

We believe that by offering a private 121 tuition for Peter, we provide him with a tailored approach to his specific needs we can help him learn specialised skills so he can excel in his career.

We will know this to be true when he is proficient in the new animation software and reviews the experience highly.

Develop

How Might We's | Design Studio | Feature Prioritisation | User Flow | Iterations

DESIGN STUDIO IDEATION

As a group, we carried out a number of timed sketching sessions in a ‘Design Studio’ to think of creative solutions to our problem through the following steps:

We all sketched out solutions to the two ‘How Might We’ scenario’s.

We explained our designed, and voted on the ideas we thought provided a good solution.

We bounced off each others’ ideas and continued to refine and develop our ideas.

We combined a number of ideas in the final product.

Design Studio sketches

FEATURE PRIORITISATION

The features with the highest priority that came out of the Design Studio's were:

Choosing topics/set goals.

Out of hours contact.

Tutor information: work examples/reviews/introduction.

Flexible schedule for lessons.

Interactive classes - e.g. virtual whiteboard.

SITE MAP

Informed by Skillshare’s current website, I created a Site Map to organise where the new Private Tuition would sit, highlighted in purple.

We wanted the new additional features to sit separately to the pre-recorded courses.

We needed to ensure easy access to these features from the homepage.

USER FLOWS

A user flow helped us understand Peter’s new journey and structure what screens we needed to sketch out our first prototype. We set out two scenarios:

Peter needs to find a tutor that meets his learning requirements and book a lesson at a time that suits him.

He also needs to be able to join a class and review class resources later.

DESIGNING BASED ON USER TESTING, ITERATIONS AND USER INSIGHTS

Starting with paper sketches, we iterated to mid-fidelity wireframes and ended with our high-fidelity prototype. This involved lots of iterations based on feedback and user insights. I created the test scripts we used as a group.

Example of low fidelity sketches

We tested our designs with 15 users and iterated through 2 more rounds according to their feedback — bringing our screens from mid fidelity right up to hi fidelity.

Some of the key improvements from this iteration phase were:

Simplified content: We stripped down the screens, and reworded any confusing terminology.

Removed redundant screens: We changed the layout of the My Tuition screens, were a redundant screen for ‘My Subjects’ was removed as users did not feel like this was necessary and actually created a lot of confusion. This means the site map was also revised in order to reflect this change.

Added some needed context and clarification: We also included more information in confirmation stages of booking a lesson, e.g. more booking confirmation information, and including the option for the lesson to be added to calendars.

Iterations of 'My Tuition' page

Deliver

Style Guide | Empty State | Prototype

STYLE GUIDE

It was important to us for the solution to maintain the look and feel of the Skillshare platform, in order for it to feel part of the website.

We were not able to obtain the official Skillshare official Style Guide, so we developed our own based on their website.

EMPTY STATE

I felt that we could enhance the user experience for this new Skillshare feature by ensuring that there was always clear guidance for what each page was for.

I created an empty state for a page that would not yet have information.

For first time users, it is important to provide guidance as to what each page is for and encourage the user to interact with the product.

In this case, I designed a page for ‘Tasks’ which may not have been set by the Tutor yet, and encourage the user to message the Tutor to ask for his set Tasks.

FINAL DESIGNS

Our final designs can be seen in the Figma Prototype here or can be seen below.

SO, HOW DOES THE PROTOTYPE TACKLE THE BRIEF?

Users are able to browse and select Tutors from the homepage, with the new offering seamlessly integrated into the Skillshare website. Additions to the navigation and having a new hero image of the offering allows users to access it easily.

Users then can continue on their journey by checking Tutor availability and directly book classes within the platform. They are able to compare expertise and reviews from previous users, establishing trust and transparency of the process.

Finally users can conduct Tutoring through the platform itself, reducing friction of joining classes, or sharing resources using many different platforms.

Skillshare will be able to expand their business to existing and new customers online, plugging a gap in the market for private tuition, whilst still maintaining their established brand image in the industry.

Final Thoughts

As my first group project at General Assembly, it was a great learning experience to balance applying out new UX skills, whilst working as a team. We all have very different backgrounds and skills to bring to the table. At first, it took a while for us to adjust to each other’s working styles. However, we overcame this through using a retrospective half way through the project, and the team appointed me as the official facilitator for the sprint. As facilitator, I ensured we all had room to discuss ideas as a group, but also trusted each other to progress forward.

I found it really valuable to have a retrospective, to have that open and honest conversation of where we were doing great and where we could improve. These steps made a huge difference to the second week of the project, and we worked as a productive, efficient and happy team.

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