This is a case study for a business design challenge. The brief was to optimize learning experience for Hahow, a Taiwan-based online learning platform that offers a variety of courses, like design, coding and many more.
Hahow faced the challenge of low assignment completion rate , therefore low course completion and low teacher student interaction.
1. Understand the root causes behind low assignment participation and low grading rates
2. Develop solutions to motivate students to complete their assignments, and for teachers to give feedbacks on a regular basis.
As a team of 6, I contributed to user research and was responsible for the design and optimization of the teachers' grading experience, including A/B testing.
According to Hahow, the number of students who didn't submit assignments was 49x the number of those who did. Through our survey, we collected a total of 61 valid responses and find out 5 top reasons why these students did not submit assignments:
We interviewed six Hahow students, asking them to complete the entire assignment submission process. Through these interviews, we aimed to understand their pain points and potential needs.
During these sessions, we observed users as they performed their tasks and asked questions to understand their thought processes and behaviors. We collected their feedback and identified a few key pain points:
"The workspace is difficult to use, even for experienced users."
"Isn't clear what my current status is, not sure if my edits are successful."
"I had to view other students work for reference, but face the difficulty of searching for a good reference."
"I had to save my work go back to the previous screen for instruction while editing."
"Felt quite disappointed when I didn't receive any feedbacks, not sure what can be improved."
"If teachers provide more feedback, I would be more motivated to complete assignments."
Without direct contact with the teachers, we analyzed existing data and information from Hahow, along with other online resources, we had a few findings and identified a few pain points.
Managing assignments for multiple courses requires a significant amount of time, often leading to time management stress, especially with more specialized assignments.
Inconsistent quality of student assignments makes it difficult to provide uniform feedback. Also, students often lack guidance when submitting assignments, leading to inconsistent levels of completion. This makes responding to assignments very tedious.
Teachers felt tedious when navigating between students' work. They also felt that they would be happier with AI tools to help with feedbacks.
With the data we collected and the data Hahow provided, we came up with personas and user stories to make sure we cater to both groups and had the users in mind when we think of solutions and come up with designs.
motivate students to submit assignments and teachers to review student work on a more frequent basis, creating a healthy interaction cycle between them to promote assignments submission rate?
1-3 months
• By optimizing platform user experience for both teacher and students, decreasing the friction of the current experience.
• Provide AI assistance tool to teachers to encourage responses.
3-6 months
• Further motivate students to submit assignments and interactions by gifting Hahow points. Encourage students to interact with each other using likes and feedbacks to increase user engagement.
• With increasing user satisfaction and retention, teachers can use stats of course completion & high standards assignments as a form of promotion to increase revenue.
6 months and above
Encourage students to post their course completion certificate on platforms like 104 and Linkedin. Once recognition of brand is established, students' motivation to complete assignments (course) will naturally increase.
Goal: To help guide students complete their assignments without previous frictions.
Goal: To help students save time in endlessly finding works that were graded and quality works for reference.
Goal: Increase efficiency for teachers, along with AI feedback suggestions to assist teachers with grading.
During the wireframing process, I created two navigation options in hope to increase efficiency for teachers.
Unsure of which layout is more intuitive for users, which option facilitates faster task completion, I decided to test these two navigation structures to determine which one our teachers like better and collect user feedbacks. Due to the time constraint and to identifying user preferences at an early stage, I decided to use hi-fi prototyping for A/B testing.
We sent out the A/B test created using Maze, an online user research and testing platform to users including Hahow users and teacher assistants.
We collected around 40 responses in which 61% of the users liked the side-by-side panel better. The users felt that the side-by-side panel, even though hard to process at first glance as a first time user than the first option, but proves for quicker navigation between works.
Feedbacks from real users:
"I like the concept of a one page view to see where I currently am, with the ability to view thumbnails and all information at once, allowing for quicker navigation to other assignments."
Feedback and Next Steps
I'm glad to have received good feedbacks from the users and from the team regarding the optimization of the teachers' interface. If I had more time, the next step I would take is to iterate the new AI suggestions feature and the frequently used feedbacks.
Due to the timeline, in this phase we aim to enhance interactions among students and teachers through the improved workflow, ultimately strengthening learning outcomes. In the long term, our goal is to establish Hahow's course completion certificates as a trusted credential in the market while increasing Hahow's active users and user retention.
