A desktop application that reimagines virtual learning of K-12 students, opening doors to a futuristic fun way of hybrid learning model.
The product has been accepted into IU’s only incubator – limited to 30 startups!
View Process Deck
When the pandemic hit, all things including schools transitioned online. K-12 school students were particularly affected. It became difficult for kids to focus on studies and the new normal became the most difficult time of their life. ViLearn aims at bridging this game by providing kids a more engaging platform to have an holistic growth.
User Research • Visual Design • Brand Identity
Idea Conceptualization • Interaction Design
October - December 2020
Personalized dashboard to spark creativity & individuality!
Students can quickly track their progress, see how much they've built their castle and even customize their castles! Students can also add top friends in the dashboard to see their progress and have a friendly competition!
Realtime quiz during the classroom to make the experience engaging!
To make the one way online classroom communication more engaging teachers can launch preset quiz questions related to the lecture. This will keep the kids engaged and excited to earn points which will help them build their castle.
User profile and gamified experience to stay motivated!
Students can earn points and badges as they make progress, which ultimately contribute towards building a piece of the castle! They can also maintain streaks and track their attendance through the profile section.
Engaging activities like 360 virtual tours and more!
Teachers and students can experience 360 virtual tours together and can react and comment on their experiences in real time!
Build your castle through the points earned by interaction!
Visualizing your progress has never been so fun. Kids can earn points through engagement and interaction which will help them complete their castle step by step.
A fun onboarding to set up the mood!
The first impression is often said to prevail. A fun onboarding session to give a sneak peek at the platform will motivate the exploratory nerve for young minds.
Listing our assumptions: what we thought was the problem
When we first started looking into this space, we thought the problems were mainly:
Lack of discipline
More distractions which ultimately led to lesser concentration
Lack of self-motivation
Lack of extra curricular activities
To validate our assumptions we conducted primary research and get into the roots of the problem.
The social needs weren’t fulfilled: Kids miss their friends.
“I really miss my Karate & Swimming classes, it’s not the same online”
Students need personal attention and a need for self-expression
“School used to be so fun! I used to enjoy a lot with my friends and knowing what they are up to”
Low engagement with online platforms results in low attention span.
“Usually, I just shut my video and eat breakfast during class, many students do that”
Middle-Schooler
Active, Distracted, Friendly
Alexandra is a teenager in ninth grade, who has just transitioned to complete remote learning. She finds it hard to concentrate in classes, loses her interest sometime after the class begins. She misses her friends and it becomes frustrating to catchup with everything.
Class Instructor
Focused, Adaptable, Dedicated
Katie is the instructor for grade ninth students. She found it tough to transition to the virtual teaching methodology but she has now adapted to it. The main challenge for her is to keep the kids engaged and motivated enough to understand difficult concepts.
The insights generated from the interviews guided us in evaluating the existing products against the metrics that came up frequently.
Most platforms were less engaging for kids and had almost no social interactions. Although Classcraft seemed promising as it had gamified the complete learning experience it lacked the balance of academic learning and felt too overwhelming.
Social interactions and development is an essential component of a child’s growth.
Teenagers exhibit a need for self expression and developing their identity.
Existing learning platforms lack engagement and kids lose interest due to short attention span.
We started ideating by making some low fidelity sketches. This was mainly done to get some initial feedback.
Student Dashboard
Assignment Tab
Calendar View
Attendance Tab
We took feedback from 10 people of different age groups and experience. Some key takeaways were as follows:
The current version looked very similar to canvas or any ordinary CMS platform. What were we bringing new to the table?
The low fidelity wireframes gave a very monotonous vibe and lacked our concept to support individuality.
We wanted to support creativity of individuals, but the activities and assignments did not reflect it.
We were focusing on too many things altogether, rather than pinning down what was important for our primary user.
To improve upon our concept we took inspiration from diverse platforms from language learning platforms like Duolingo to games like Hay Day and even Github. All these platforms help boost engagement while making the tasks much more fun. Flipgrid soared during the pandemic because of it’s personalized style of creating educational videos and giving children creative freedom. Other apps such as Anne Frank’s 3D tour combined with Facebook’s messenger Kids features would also make for the perfect collaborative learning environment.
Provide a more engaging & fun virtual learning experience for K-12 students affected by the pandemic?
Cultivate engagement among middle schoolers to facilitate a better learning experience?
Encourage self-expression to provide a more personalized learning environment?
We wanted to make sure we choose features with high reward and low effort to begin with. We asked kids to rate their favorite features and discussed the engineering efforts with a few developers to move forward with our final design decisions.
Based on our design principles, and the feature prioritization we built our information architecture with a dashboard for quick access to highlighted features and a vertical navigation to jump to other categories.
We wanted our brand to be playful, inviting and fun, so we tried to achieve that through bright colors, friendly fonts and rounded corners in the UI and layout. The UI has a lot of whitespace and breathing room to feel more welcoming and calm.
I love the dark theme mode, It is so cool makes me want to use the app right away!” - 16 year old
“WOW! This is so much better than a Teams! The Rapunzel Castle is the best one.” -12 year old
“Your product looks very promising and is very much implementable. If I had time, I would have loved to develop it” - Software Engineer, Amazon
- Adaption of features such as pomodoro and clubs and the increase in usage over time.
- Average time spent on profiles.
- Number of times the profile is customized in a month through castle customizations, changing profile avatars and dashboard themes.
- Rise in participation of virtual classes, polling and quiz as well as collaborative activities every quarter.
- Completion rate of assignments & activities.
When so many products already exist in the market, it became essential to question our idea at every stage and determining what are the unique things we are bringing to the table.
The scope of the product kept on increasing and we found ourselves overwhelmed. Only after narrowing our focus to the primary persona and key distinguishing ideas we were able to move forward.
Interviewing and recruiting kids was challenging. Planning activities to understand their behavior in a subtle way was our major challenge in the research phase.
