Overview

About

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.
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Problem

Hahow faced the challenge of low assignment completion rate , therefore low course completion and low teacher student interaction.
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My Role

As a team of 5, I contributed to user research and was responsible for the design and optimization of the teachers' grading experience, which received good feedbacks from the users during the testing phase.
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Understanding Students

Online surveys: What makes submitting homework so undesirable?

To get more insights to why students were not submitting their homework, we conducted an online survey and collected a total of 51 valid responses to get the below data.
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• The no. of students who did not submit assignments was 49x the number of those who did.
• Overall, students lack motivation to complete homework
• Students are more likely to submit homework if teachers provide feedbacks
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Contextual Inquiries: Get deeper insights to how they use the platform. What are their struggles?

Tackling this global issue requires a deeper understanding. After reviewing the survey, we conducted contextual inquiries session and interviewed 6 Hahow students.
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During these sessions, we observed users as they performed their tasks and asked questions to understand their thought processes and behaviors. We collected many feedbacks like:

We then sorted their feedbacks and identified a few key pain points:
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Key pain points

1. Students had a hard time navigating the interface.
2. They felt helpless with the lack of guidance and clear instructions.
3. They felt disappointed with the lack of feedbacks from teachers.

What are the struggles for teachers in giving feedback?

Without direct access to 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.
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1. Lack of time.

Managing assignments for multiple courses requires a significant amount of time, often leading to time management stress, especially with more specialized assignments.
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2. Inconsistent quality of work, making it hard to give uniform feedback.

Inconsistent quality of student assignments makes it difficult to provide uniform feedback, making responding to assignments very tedious.
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3. Need for better UI with AI assistance when giving feedbacks.

Teachers felt tedious when navigating between students' work. They also felt that they would be happier with AI tools to help with feedbacks.

How might we

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?

Solution

After identifying both user groups' pain points and needs, we came to a few design solutions that can help both parties at the same time. Below showcases one of the main solutions for this project designed by myself.

Solution 1: Add "Best Works" stamps for students references

Select quality work for students to view as reference.
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Goal is to let students quickly differentiate high quality work for reference, which helps solve the lack of guidance and helps improve consistent work quality.

Solution 2: Introduce a whole new grading experience for teachers

According to the feedback collected, teachers had felt tedious when navigating between students' work on the current interface. Thus, we decided to redesign the whole grading system experience.
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Goal: Increase efficiency for teachers, along with AI feedback suggestions to assist teachers with grading. With more feedbacks, we aim to increase students' motivation to submit homework.
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Highlight

• Side-by-side panel: Teachers can view all the homework in one glance and switch easily between works.
• Grading Assistance: Introduce AI Suggestions to assist teachers in giving feedbacks
• Frequently Used: Saved frequently used responses and make quick edits for the next one
• Mobile friendly: Develop mobile experience that allows teachers to grade assignments whenever

With teachers’ tight schedule and busy lifestyle, I also decided to develop a mobile experience that allows teachers to grade assignments whether they’re commuting or wherever they are, hoping to increase their willingness to grade assignments.

Design Process

Two UX Explorations

During the wireframing process, I created two navigation options in hope to increase efficiency for teachers.

Used Mazed for A/B Testing

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.

Users like the side panel better.

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.

Hahow: Optimizing and incorporating AI into grading system