I got the opportunity to join the Edily team as their UX Design Intern during my gap year. Edily is start-up with goals to engage students in course material in a familiar and fun way. Edily will be launching later this year!
Role : UX Design Intern
Team : Design mentorship from Ally Stellati, other roles in project management, curriculum consult, and develo
Skills :
Duration : 8 weeks ; March 2021 - June 2021
Edily is a mobile application bringing the creativity, remixability, and entertaining magic from social platforms to an app focused on education, learning goals, and personalized content.
See my mentor Ally Stellati’s portfolio for Edily’s starting research.
Take past visionary work made by General Assembly and design app wireframes that are more realistic for engineering constraints in consideration of the development timeline & feature depth
Previously my mentor's General Assembly cohort conducted exploratory research and prototyping for the end goal of Edily in the far future. With plans to launch later in the fall the team needed to create wireframes that would work incrementally towards the north star designs from GA with respect to development feasibility.
Constraints with MVP First launch :
I performed a competitive analysis of similar apps to Edily, particularly Tiktok, Bansho, Byte, and BYJU. The research was helpful in understanding the flow of apps as well as how they chose to organize video categories. The analysis was also helpful for other design inspiration such as sizing and spacing. All this research would be compiled to our Start Up’s Airtable to be used for review in product meetings.
With my mentor we began the design process building fidelity so that we could get confirmation on major features during low level stages.
We started with a site map to establish the app flow with project managers and engineering.
We worked up to high fidelity after reviewing features, using design inspiration, and utilizing open source UI resources.
Feed Page : a place for users to browse popular content in an infinite scrolls style to tik tok.
Course Content Page : Video galleries organized according to AP curriculum in a mind map structure to emphasize connection between topics for students to learn the most.
Saved page : a place for users to bookmark videos throughout the app to use as later reference
Profile page : for users to share about themselves, their learning journey, and upload their own content
Previously focused on engineering feasibility for Fall launch, but wanted to also prioritize uniqueness.
As a team we decided to incorporate a mind mapping content organization for the first launch in order to set Edily apart from other learning apps.
I conducted more research doing a comparative analysis across many mind mapping apps. For all apps I conducted cognitive walkthroughs and analyzed app store reviews to note common user pain points and use cases in order to get insight on what users want from a good idea organization tool.
How to organize course content page according to curriculum maps designed by learning team into the unique mind map format
To brainstorm new ways to organize the curriculum map based off the education team CEO Jackson Foster organized a design thinking workshop which had participants from both the design team and education team.
Crazy 4s : one minute each to draw 4 ideas of how to organize the mind map, then 4 minutes total to refine 2 ideas
From the sketches the different teams came up with I created higher fidelity iterations to experiment.
This exercise helped me narrow down ideas to my favorite design...
Horizontal Scroll 💖💖💖
Allows for users to travel back to see the connections between concepts and displaying video previews at the bottom
more original than the original drop down list and feels less tiring than scrolling lots of content vertically
Moving on to usability testing we asked teachers to participate for one hour to review our app. Most participants were contacted through LinkedIn and I got to personally invite my old Chemistry teachers from high school and community college to participate.
Our usability testing was conducted over the platform Maze which let us track and heatmap participant exploration throughout our prototype. We had another segment for our sessions that involved a card sorting task so we could gain more insight on how teachers organize curriculum content.
Research was compiled and organized into an Airtable spreadsheet for a research synthesis
Our Main Findings :
This was my first major UX design project working with a full cross functional team. I got to learn a lot about both the HCD process as well as the product development cycle and cross functional roles.
I especially appreciate my mentor Ally and CEO Jackson for exposing me to many product development tools like Airtable, Maze, Jira, etc. I also got to learn ways to improve and seek resources in UX such as material UI, autolayout, prototyping, and more!
