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aedan.g@gmail.com
case study
learn well
A conceptual platform for self-directed online learners
The Background
This project was an individual capstone university project with a focus on research based decision making in the UX design process. The outcome was a conceptual UX case study and a Figma prototype. I began this project when I noticed how difficult it had become to keep my saved videos, articles, posts, and courses organized across multiple platforms.
Initial Research
Kickoff
My first step was to survey people who learn online regularly and get some general insights into their current experiences and feelings surrounding how they organize their resources. This way, I would be able to confirm/disprove my initial assumptions early on and have a starting point for further research.
Initial Assumptions
I wanted to try and disprove these initial assumptions I had from my own experience.
  • People use more than one online resource
  • Searching for an online resource is challenging
  • Organizing online resources is challenging
Survey Insights
To try and disprove these initial assumptions I sent out a survey. Through 14 survey participants I discovered:
Secondary Research
I wanted to understand further as to why people were dissatisfied with their online learning organization as well as other pain-points and challenges they might have. To do this, I read studies, journal articles, and online blogs. In summary:
Self-directed online learners struggle with organization, motivation, and planning.
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It can be difficult to organize resources, notes, deadlines, and assignments across platforms.
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Self-directed learners can often struggle with motivation when learning on their own.
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It can be difficult to plan and achieve goals without guidance.
Self-directed online learners succeed when:
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Setting a goal and breaking it down into smaller, actionable steps.
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Remaining accountable and committing to deadlines for those actionable steps.
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Self-reflecting in order to learn from an experience and improve for the future.
User Persona
In order to have a clear reference for the kind of person I’m designing for, I created a user persona based on the results from the initial survey and the secondary research conducted.
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Rosa
22 years old, barista
Summary
Rosa is currently a Barista wanting to make a career transition into Programming. She has been doing her best managing a full time job and learning on her own. Often times, she’s tired after a long day at work and tends to improvise her learning as she goes. She feels she isn’t progressing as fast as she wants to because she feels disorganized and doesn’t have a clear roadmap to follow.
Frustrations
  • Doesn’t have a way to measure her progress
  • Her resources are disorganized and hard to recall
  • Current organizational tools are too difficult to use
  • Difficulty staying motivated
Goals
  • Land a programming job
  • Create a programming portfolio
  • Organize her learning
  • Make her learning more efficient
Core Features
After my initial research into people’s online learning experience, it was clear that many were struggling with organization, planning, and motivation. I wanted my design to help people with:
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organizing learning resources
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creating effective plans
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setting goals and objectives
Value Proposition
An online desktop application geared towards self-directed online learners. The application aims to take people from confused and lost with their own learning journey to confident and equipped to reaching their learning goals. They will no longer have to wonder where that article or video is because the application will provide an organizational feature for all resources across the internet. People will also be able to create effective plans by breaking their goals down into manageable steps.
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lost and disorganized
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terminal
set goals,
create plans,
organize resources
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sentiment_very_satisfied
confident and equipped
Market Research
I found that a common pain-point experienced when using popular organizational apps is the abundance of features. These large feature lists can be useful for many users, especially power users and those who already have organizational skills. However, for someone needing more guidance in terms of organization, an abundance of features and lack of onboarding can leave one feeling overwhelmed.
Designing the Initial Prototype
Feature Prioritization
To come up with a list of features I used the user goals discovered during my research.
user goals
  • Better organize their online learning resources
  • Structure their online learning experience to reach their goals better
  • Easily find resources that will help them learn
  • Help others by reviewing resources that they found useful or ones to avoid
  • Help others by sharing what plans and collections they used to achieve their goals
initial features
  • Create Plan
  • Create Objectives
  • Create Tasks
  • Create Collection
  • Search for Resources
  • Review Resources
  • Share Collection
  • Share Plan
Task Flows and User Flows
before laying down the information architecture I needed to get a sense of the most important flows that a user would be going through when using the platform. This helped me have a better idea of where the different features and pages would fit.
Information Architecture V1
I went on to create an initial version of the information architecture. This helped me get a good idea of the foundations of the app and how it would be navigated before designing the initial wireframes.
click to view Information Architecture V1
Sketches and Wireframes
I kept the wireframes low fidelity to more easily iterate after the first round of testing.
click to view Sketches
Dashboard
Plans
Search
Collections
Inital Prototype
First Usability Test Feedback
I sent out the Figma prototype test through maze.co and received results from 6 participants. Through this usability test, I found that people were having the most trouble navigating to ‘adding a resource to a collection’ and ‘saving a collection/plan.’
keeping note of these results, I moved into conducting user tests.
User Testing Feedback
I conducted two user tests over Zoom where the participant was prompted to complete several tasks using the Figma prototype. They were then interviewed about their thoughts and feelings towards the prototype. The most important insights I gained through these tests were:
1. The planning feature was valued more than the organizational feature
2. More insights and ways to track progress would be helpful to remain accountable and increase motivation
3. It's necessary to provide users with an onboarding feature to explain how the platform works and how it can be used
"The app helping explain 'Here's how you set a goal and achieve it' and walking through that...that right there is a huge help for me."
-Quote from user test participant
With these valuable insights gained, I decided to put more focus on refining the planning and goal tracking features of the app as well as improving the clarity of ‘collections’ and adding resources to them. I also set out to design an onboarding flow to guide new users through using the app for the first time. I found the sharing collections/plans feature unnecessary at this stage and, because test participants were already finding it confusing, I decided to put it on the shelf for the second design iteration.
Design Iteration
Dashboard
After user testing, one of the key takeaways were more insights and ways to track progress would be helpful for people to remain accountable and stay motivated. I decided the dashboard would be the best page to house these insights. The dashboard can now be easily scanned for valuable information, eliminating the need to dive further into the app unnecessarily.
The dashboard is now home to
important features such as:
  • closest deadline
  • the month's upcoming deadlines
  • a summary of goals in progress
  • weekly stats
Creating Goals and Onboarding
The ‘Goals’ feature guides users through breaking down their goals into smaller objectives and tasks while setting deadlines to hold themselves accountable to achieve what they set out to do. This feature helps self-directed online learners tackle the most common challenges when learning online - planning and motivation.
Onboarding tips help guide first
time users through breaking down
goals into objectives and tasks while
setting deadlines to hold themselves
accountable
Completing Goals, Objectives and Tasks
As users complete Tasks towards an Objective, and Objectives towards Goals, a progress bar shows how much closer they are to completion. It is normal for a plan to change along the way, that’s why users are able to add new Objectives and Tasks with the click of a button.
A crucial yet often overlooked step in the process of learning is self-reflection. At the bottom of each Objective panel, the user is prompted to reflect on their experience while completing the objective, what they learned, how they can improve, and so on.
Search and Save Learning Resources
Without having to go outside of the platform, users can search for learning resources across the web. Here, users are able to write reviews on any resource to help other users compare to other resources and decide if it’s of any value to them.
thank you for reading.
Reflection
My focus for this project was to practice making data driven design decisions. I did the best I could with the knowledge and resources I had at the time, however upon reflection, I’ve come to notice some of the things I would do differently to help understand the problem space more thoroughly and in turn, make better design decisions.

This project really helped me understand the importance of user research and creating a strategy as well as what happens when those steps are overlooked. Unfortunately, early on in the project, I made the mistake of not diving deep enough into discovering problems people face when self-directed online learning. Most of this was due to falling into the trap of clinging to the excitement of my initial ideas about what the solution could be, and the motivation that my ideas gave me. This trap caused me to base a majority of my research on those ideas, instead of discovering problems.

Because I didn’t dive deep enough into the discovery and research, I struggled to feel confident in my design decisions and lacked a solid strategy going into the design phase. I feel my research had been too shallow and focused on problems related to my ideas, rather than going further to try and discover what I didn’t already know.

I decided to take a course on user research and strategy because of this. Through the course I learned the importance of discovery through user interviews, and the subsequent exercises and artefacts such as affinity mapping, personas, customer journey mapping, and competitor analyses. Then taking the insights gained and creating a strategy to solve peoples problems with a product or service.

Had I gone through a more solid user research and strategy process, using the methods mentioned above, I would’ve felt more confident in making design decisions that were backed by solid insights. In hindsight, it would’ve been better to reel back my initial excitement to design a solution, and instead taken the time to branch out further to discover what self-directed online learners really needed.