Developing a private tuition offering for Skillshare
A UX Case Study | Concept | Creating a new feature for private lessons with a tutor
Executive Summary
A concept group project, with 3 other designers on General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive course. We were tasked to design a new feature for Skillshare, developing the option to search, book and take private lessons with a tutor.
Duration: 2 week design sprint
Our process: Business Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Screener Survey, User Interviews, Usability Testing, Feature Prioritisation, Design Studio, Ideation and Usability Testing, Rapid Prototyping, Accessibility
Tools: Paper sketching, Digital prototyping and iterations in Figma, Whiteboarding, Design Studios in Miro and User Interviews over Zoom
My role: This was a collaborative project with three other designers. I took the lead as the group facilitator, creating the user survey, the 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.
Deliverables: Clickable high fidelity prototype of finding a tutor, booking and taking a lesson.
The Brief
The client
Skillshare is learning platform with thousands of prerecorded online classes taught by practitioners from across the world.
The opportunity
Skillshare has 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
The process
We had daily stand-ups and adopted the ‘double diamond’ process. At the end of the first week, we had a group retrospective which greatly helped us work much more efficiently for the second half of the sprint.
Discovery through research
To start, we split the researching tasks. I worked creating the Survey, whilst my teammates worked on the Interview Script.
Survey
We conducted our survey which drew 33 responses. We asked about experiences with private tutors and online learning. Our findings revealed:
- 46% had private tuition online, and 37% had tuition in person.
- Overall, all our survey takers had a positive experience with their private tuition.
- 73% of people would be interested in taking online classes in the future.
User Interviews
15 Interviews | 21–35 in age | 7 male 8 female
I interviewed 4 users, with varied ages and genders. As a group we used an Affinity Map to summarise our key findings from all 15 users and identified key themes that came up.
The key findings from our user interviews were:
- People often take online classes to improve or learn new skills
- People think a 121 tuition can offer a personalised approach and they can have undivided attention to ask specific questions but only had this at school, not professionally
- People feel that a tutor’s experience/knowledge is a priority but personality is equally important
- People find important during an online class that they can learn at their own pace and get feedback & support
Competitor Research
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.
Our secondary competitor analysis consisted of a quadrant analysis. We looked at where Skillshare are currently and where they could be if the new feature is implemented. We can see, if this feature was implemented, they would move into a gap in the market, offering both interactive tutor led and course led learning.
Defining the problem
Persona
From our research we created our Persona, Peter:
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?
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.
Developing our designs
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.
Feature Prioritisation
It was important for us as a team to decide what the highest priority features were from all our ideas, so we used a feature prioritisation matrix. We focused on features which were:
- Essential to the user and having the highest impact.
- Low enough effort to produce in our short sprint.
These were:
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 below.
- 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.
Paper prototypes
In order to make the process as easy as possible for Peter, we each created paper wireframes for a section of the user journey and combined them to test with users. I created the initial two screens.
I wrote a testing script to use during these user sessions. This ensured that we would ask about particular features and steps, and not miss anything out on each wireframe.
Feedback from users
After testing out low fidelity paper prototypes on 8 people, we collected our findings using post-it notes on a virtual white board and iterated again based on this feedback to create our mid fidelity prototype.
Our findings are below.
Tutor Homepage: some users found the filter options on the left to be unclear.
My Tuition Account page: users found the layout confusing and too busy.
- The tabs did not make sense for users
- Functionality of each tab was not clear
Iterating from sketches to digital prototypes
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.
Delivering our solution
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.
Mock Up
After multiple iterations and exploring the visual design elements, we were able to produce an interactive prototype.
You can see the finished prototype below:
What we would do next
- Continue to do more user research on both existing & new users
- Explore alternative user journeys for other persona’s
- Build out ‘nice to have’ features, and the remaining screens of the website for the full experience
- Further testing and reiteration!
Takeaways
As our first group project, 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.
Yay! You made it to the end! Thank you for reading.
If you would like to see other UX projects that I have worked on you can take a look at my other Case Studies on Medium. Alternatively, if you’d like to discuss future work or simply say hi, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn.
