Pearson English Business Solutions provides online business English learning tools. I was contracted to work specifically on the One product’s goal setting initiative in which learners set a weekly goal to motivate them to progress through their current level.
It is difficult to get learners to set time aside from their busy work schedule and stay motivated to learn English. To tackle this we came up with a way to stay on track by setting manageable weekly goals. The main idea was to create a user centric visual experience that would be quickly understood by users of all cultures and languages.
Coming into this project, I had to immerse myself in the current user experience of the One product to understand how users were currently interacting with the product to not disrupt their current flow.
Another challenge was keeping in mind that the users were not native English speakers, so I wanted to focus on keeping the experience visual and easy to understand.
Working with an agile framework, we established design stories in our 3-week sprints. Breaking these stories down into small tasks helped me think fully through the problems. We also utilized feedback loops in an iterative process.
To get a better understanding of the user's point of view I created quick sketches of the journey they take to study. This allowed us to pinpoint the steps we needed to improve on.
To get an idea of the layout of the homepage on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices I created wireframes using Adobe Comp.
Working with the Product Owner, we established ways in which the learner can track both their short-term weekly goal, and their long-term level progress. First we created a widget on the homepage. This is intended to be a quick visualization of the user’s weekly progress.
Creating a design to track the user’s long-term progress was more difficult given that there were several ways to track level progress. Working with learning experts and the product owner, we wanted to create something that was motivating without overwhelming the user with too much information.
From the start of this project we wanted to keep the goal setting progress charts as simple as possible without disrupting the user’s current way interacting with the product. Since the One product already had a way for users to track their time spent of the site, we went back and forth about whether we should modify the existing page to reflect their goal, or create a completely new page specific to goal setting. From A/B testing we were able to see that people found the new graph much more clear and motivating.
This was a great project to work on since it gave me experience balancing conflicting visions of several teams, including the Product Owner, the Learning Experts, and my own design opinions. It also gave me a great insight on how different teams work in the Scrum framework.
I look forward to the implementation of this initiative and tracking user feedback next year.