English Dost

Learnings from Designing an Award-winning App to Learn Engish

HELPING IMPROVE THE LIVELIHOOD OF A MILLION-PLUS FOLKS

2016 - 2017

 

Role

Founding designer

User researcher

Tools

Design: Sketch, Invision

Dev handoff: Zeplin

Analytics: Hotjar, custom analytics

Collaborators:

UI design: Arun Raj

Content lead: Krithika Krishnamurthy

Product Manager: Ram Kakkad

Engineering lead: Pankaj Chand

Customer demography:

  • Hindi and Kannada speakers

  • Blue collared workers

  • Based or from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India

 

ABOUT ENGLISH DOST

English Dost means “Your English-Speaking Friend”. It was an early-stage India-based startup in the ed-tech space where I was the founding designer and lead the user experience across all products under the English Dost umbrella.

MY ROLE

Designing at an early-stage startup required me to think beyond the individual pixels and consider how different aspects of the products fit into the broader market and customer needs, whether it’s designing the brand assets, planning the marketing deliverables or designing a B2B app for the mentor to monitor student progress. It was important to think about how the brand delivered a cohesive and engaging experience for the customer.

KEY PROJECTS

  • Design the Android app;

  • Co-designing a scalable learning framework

  • Designing a mentoring app for our blended/B2B learning program

INVISION LINK TO DESIGNS

 
 

Target demography

Needs and challenges

The core product of English Dost was envisioned to solve a niche problem - to help users achieve confidence in spoken English.

Our target demographic was folks in tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India who could read and write English but had difficulty speaking it due to lack of practice and poor grammar. Our initial target users belonged to the Hindi and Kannada speaking belt who were between 20 to 40 yrs old.

WHY WAS SUCH A MULTILINGUAL USER BASE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH ENGLISH?
Most Indians can converse between 2-6 languages but English is the hardest to speak due to its colonial past. People are scared of pronouncing things wrong and being judged it is assumed to be a reflection of education/class. This particularly affects blue-collar workers who are in customer-facing roles from progressing in their careers.

THE CHALLENGES

  1. This was a price-sensitive customer base: They were sensitive about the internet cost to load and update apps.

  2. Low-end smartphones: This significantly reduced the performance of the app. To address it, we avoided unnecessary animations.

Below is a short video of the CEO and Saroj, an early user-turned-community manager, speak about the app

 

A Peek into the Initial designs

  • Splash screen

  • Choose language

  • Choose level

  • Start lesson

  • 1. Lesson type / Grammar

  • Interactive exercise

  • 2. Lesson type / Sentence comprehension

  • Mock interview practice

  • Results

  • 3. Lesson type / Conversation practice

  • Mock interview practice

  • Results

Key Learnings from Designing for English Dost

1. Don’t design for Ed-Tech. Instead design for education, using technology.

2. Co-create with your learning community.

3. Optimize UX and UI for Better Learning

Lesson 1

Don’t design for Ed-Tech. Instead design for education, using technology.

The end-users of Education and EdTech industry products–the ones actually using the digital experiences we’re designing for–are the same. So our goal was to design solutions that address the learning needs of all, irrespective of their technological savviness.

How?

We used a mix of analytics, customer outreach and interviews to understand our user needs.

Below: Mapping of learning gaps

What did we find?

Our typical users were people working in customer-facing roles. A lot of them juggled more than one job to make ends meet so they had limited time and energy and mostly used our app with other language learning apps like Hello English.

Solution

- Our goal was to improve confidence in spoken English so we focused on repetitions and practice.

- We focused on teaching grammar and sentence construction without getting into the technical aspects of the language.

- Our lessons were byte-sized and included recaps to help the users recall where they left off.

Lesson 2

Co-create with your learning community.

  • In EdTech, the end-user rarely has a choice in the products they’re using on a daily basis and they are most likely underrepresented in the organization’s design process.

  • As UX designers, it is our responsibility to create easy-to-use and beautiful solutions that address all types of learning needs. To achieve this successfully we should co-create the solution with the users.

  • While co-creating may be a challenging task, in EdTech it is what drives the most progressive solutions and has the ability to directly improve the lives of those within our learning community.

How?

We organised workshops to integrate UX and instruction design to test out content and address minute gaps in the existing lesson plans.

Below: Mapping of learning gaps

Solution

  • We designed a scalable learning framework that accommodates different learning needs to make the app engaging and improve retention.

  • The major challenge was to reuse existing content stacks. The framework was developed to make it adaptable across different languages, improve retention, provide a smooth onboarding to a new language and incorporate practice and variability as features.

  • We used CEFR as a reference for gauging learning outcomes.

Implementation status

It was evaluated in an offline class of 15 students. The framework was used as a reference by the content team to create a content strategy to accommodate evolving business-specific requirements.

Lesson 3

Optimize UX and UI for better learning.

By applying learning science principles to the user flows in your products, you’ll support students as they learn and retain new concepts.

In this context, user flows are the paths that a student takes in the edTech product to complete a task. Essential user flows in the English Dost app included:

  1. Onboarding, and

  2. Learning content sequencing.

  1. Onboarding

When users log in to your edTech product for the first time, they’re learning how to navigate a new piece of software while also learning a new concept or practising a new skill. 

In UX design for education, this means balancing product training tasks with concept training tasks. Product training tasks help users get the most out of your product features. Concept training tasks, on the other hand, support edTech users as they learn a new academic concept.

Below: The stages of the different learning loops for a new user

2. Learning content sequencing

Great edTech product design involves a collaborative effort between UX and content designers. Because content sequencing has the power to give users agency over their learning goals,  strong UX choices in this workflow contribute to a better overall learning experience. 

Unlike print learning content, digital content can be broken down into discrete components that add back up to an entire user flow. Most importantly, your learning content must be presented in a way that minimizes overwhelm. Specific content sequencing strategies will support this goal, including:

  • Spreading content across multiple screens for digestibility

  • Including progress monitors, so students know where they are and how long a lesson or task will take

  • Integrating just-in-time help to keep students moving through lessons

The more your UX design choices give students options for moving through learning content, the easier it will be for your users to work at their own pace and make choices about what and how they learn.

 

Final Designs

English Dost started as a chat-based guided learning experience with storytelling but was ineffective for repetitive practice so updated the design.

Our final design combined storytelling with the option of incorporating multiple modules, along with a new colour palette that addressed existing accessibility issues.

 

A sample lesson UI

  • Intro

  • 01/ Instruction

  • 02/ Instruction

  • 03/ Instruction

  • 04/ Instruction

  • 01/ Record reading material

  • 02

  • 03/ Stop recording

  • 04/ Submit recording

  • Feedback/ Listen to your response

  • Feedback/ Alternate UI

  • Feedback/ Alternate UI

  • Results