Building Productivity -tools for BYJU’S users
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My Internship Project at BYJU’s as a product design intern
Intro
Objective
The project's objective was to build a set of productivity tools to increase the productivity and learning of students while taking lessons and after the sessions for revision and comprehension.
It’s aimed at making learning more productive by improvising the methods of revision and learning. This project's scope is colossal, but I was determined to work on a single tool that could be monumental for a student’s life from a set of tools.
Timeline
6 months
Sneak Peak
The project went through different phases of exploration, at the end we came up with a smart conversing tool,
To understand this better, Let’s break it down in terms of a hypothetical BYJU’s student Sans, who is one of the users, using the app.
- Sans should be able to achieve several parameters she works on, and the ability to utilise the tools efficiently, tools should be smart enough and productive enough that it helps in her self-regulated learning by providing her with better practice and revision for subjects.
- Sans should be able to utilise tools to enhance her personal learning experience, making it easier for her to manage tasks that can be automated, most importantly, manage her valuable time. It should be the tools blending in according to her, rather than forcing her to break her study patterns, they should personalise to her own productive patterns.
Before explaining my design process, this would be easier for you folks to understand it by breaking it down into three phases
Phase 1: Initial Problem Space Exploration
📄 Research
The first question that came to my mind was — what is productivity and how does it help anyone?
Understand the problem space
Productivity refers to their efforts and ability to perform efficiently in their studies. This involves how well they manage their time, their ability to prioritise, and their overall input into achieving academic success.
To understand the virtue of productivity, I made a questionnaire with questions to ask students from Classes 6–12th to understand their perspectives on their usual studying patterns
Some questions from the interviews
Observed Insights :
- Planning of studies varies from person to person, mostly in younger groups, students require a tuition teacher, or a parent to help them plan daily revision. On the other hand, older students make a schedule on paper/phone in advance for daily practice.
- Most students don’t make notes in the classes, as they are provided with notes from their classes, the habit of noting down important concepts is observed less
- Watching a playlist and videos online is the most resort source to revise concepts of the particular subject before an exam
Students resort to methods of pre-made resources and last-minute tools for revision and learning.
🪄 Identifying Opportunities
Secondary Research from journals and online resources revealed studies that Students evidenced Self Regulated Learning skill categories including the ability to set goals, plan activities, consider alternatives, monitor and reflect, perceive diverse cues from various sources, readjust plans to improve progress rates and demonstrate accountability are accounted to show higher productivity in academics.
In order to feel how a user would, we tried to map out the daily life cycle of BYJU’S student, and note down the patterns which we can observe.
Thus, I identified opportunities to work on during the following phases analysing them in their student lifecycle, which is pre-class, during class and post class. The experience of having the tools should impact all these phases
We then used the how might we approach to wind down to the main use cases to focus on while exploring the solutions
Phase 2: Exploring the best options
Once the use cases were clear, we explored competitors and the internet solving similar problems as us
🏃🏽♀️ Ideation and the Design Sprint
We involved multiple interns in a week's activity where the objective is
- Exploring and ideating on the accountability use case for productivity tools
- Ideate on involving Sparky the bot to help with accountability use cases
Post identifying the areas, I shortlisted a few Ideas for several Tools to work with
- Study Planner
- Brain Breaks
- Accountability buddy
- Notes
- Bookmarking Videos
- Stats and Tips
Following are the use cases:
School Diary
- A floating action button that expands to be a note taking widget.”
- Sparky as the school diary, can act as a popup version to write your important notes
Automated to-do list
Helping students achieve more by having a todo list also providing a tutor to put up tasks easily while teaching in the class
- Displaying important tasks with a symbol or a timer to create a sense of urgency
- Having it seamlessly integrated into the class page for ease of viewing
Stats and Tips
Tips for users to get better in studies and get new notifications on the subjects and get tips through =notifications and setting up a buddy to help users with the tasks according to their statistics
🔎 Identifying the Best Use case
We combined a school diary, an automated to-do list and stats and tips into one project i.e., a Smart diary.
The smart diary is like how we have a school diary where we write things to do, and exams coming up. Smart diary is smart enough to automatically set things that the user b needs to do and guide him towards a goal
Approach
Some of the features we ideated already exist in the system in other ways, we envisioned smart dairy to be more like a virtual buddy which stays with students, knows them, knows where the student is lacking, is confident etc suggests things to do, reminds them, motivates them and set up targets so that they can finally improve themselves.
So we took Sparky as the base to set a conversational approach for this whole project
Final Ideation
- Ideated on the usual pattern and behaviour of a student throughout the day and what their repeated patterns
- Identified methods to perform the tasks without much effort to do them
- Directing users easily to sources of revision, comprehension and motivation throughout the day
Phase 3
🖋️ Visualising Ideas
Conversational Approach
The diary has three components to seem more conversational, and less chatbot-ish, we went through different iterations.
Use case 1
- Monthly test preparation
2. Before attending the class
3. After attending the class
4. After finishing monthly test
Future Use cases
We can use the smart diary to engage meaningful conversations, celebrate victories, and boost positivity with the delightful “Sparky” bot.
❤️Conclusion and Learnings
This project has been an immersive journey into the depths of the UX process. Navigating through diverse use cases and endpoints, we sculpted a seamlessly user-friendly experience. It’s a lesson in approaching design crossroads by dissecting each problem as a vital part of a process, beginning with the fundamental “WHYs” and iterating until coherence is achieved.
Finally huge my invaluable mentor, Saideep, whose unwavering support has been instrumental in bringing this project to fruition!
