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WizUp

Making it simpler to find the right courses to expand the horizons of learning.

A learning app that creates opportunities to help part-time students find a way to achieve their career and professional goals.

Gallery - Elements Webflow Library - BRIX Templates

Overview

What is WizUp ?

Wizup is a mobile application designed for part-time students who want to find more extracurricular workshops and courses to grow their learning despite being only one day on campus. The aim is to create opportunities to help students find an efficient and organized way to achieve their career and professional goals.

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Client

The  Innovation Hub is a student-led initiative that collaborates with partners at the University to research strategies for improving the campus experience.

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My Role

Prototyping studio lead, conducted design sprints, led usability testing, designed low-fi and mid-fi applications, led high fidelity design and visual direction

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Team

Ishani Pandey (me), Xinyi Wang, Yu Fan, Runjie Dai, Yisu Hu, Caiyi Yang

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Tools

Figma, Balsamic, Photoshop, Illustrator, Webflow

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Timeline

8 Weeks

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Lack of suitable extra learning options for part-time students

Problem | Discover
Part time students need extra-curriculum resources to supplement their study journey and get future-ready

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Currently, part-time students come to campus only for one or two days. They find it difficult to attend any co-curriculur workshops and learning sessions because of conflicting timelines, lack of information, etc. We aim to help these students. 

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What hinders part-time students from finding learning resources?

To understand the current challenges of our users, we did in-depth background research, surveys, and interviews. We had 34 survey respondents and 12 interviewees. The majority of them wanted to explore workshops or extra courses to learn, but they were tired and had almost given up. What was stopping them from finding the right courses. 
50%
Part- time Students cannot find the information they need on the websites due to unorganised information and lack of filters.
10/12
Students miss out on opportunities since many workshops happen without prior notice and their schedules are hectic.
80%+
Students find it really difficult to find the workshops which fit in their schedule as they come to campus only one day.
60%+
Students have to travel far distances and find if difficult to choose the right workshop without any reviews or detailed info.

✹ Design Challenge

How can we help part - time students finding the suitable learning resources and building a community even though they only come to campus one day a week.

Peek into the solution

App that helps students find all the workshops that fit their schedules and not regret attending them.

We designed a mobile app so students can easily access it on the go. The solution helps part-time students find as many possible resources as per their needs. Essential information and detailed description help users shortlist and register for courses and specific features given below help ensure that part-time students do not feel left out despite their hectic schedules. 

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Find Customized Recommendations

Part-time students can quickly obtain suitable course recommendations in a few onboarding steps. The app also gets automatically synced with their university portal to give them the best recommendation in short time.

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Detailed Course Info and Reviews

Part-time students can find detailed course descriptions and peer reviews of courses in one place so they can understand course topics in a fraction of the time. The detailed filter options also help them shortlist all workshops they want.

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Find Relevant reviews and Connect with Peers with same interests

Part-time students can find more peers who attended the workshops with them or have the same interests and connect with them for further information sharing, even if they are not on campus.

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Synced Calendar and Reminders

Part-time students can cross-check their work and study schedules in one place before they enroll in a new workshop/course/event. The app also reminds them about the workshops so they dont miss out.

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What do our students need : Meet Mia, our part time student

Behavioral Archetype | Define
There are countless students like Mia who want to find the right courses but dont have time or resources to find one.

Majority of the part time students are those who are currently working in full-time positions and are looking to learn more to grow more in their career or pivot into a different field. 

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Mia's journey to find the right workshop to achieve her goal ...

User Scenario | Define
To Help understand part-time students like Mia, we mapped their journey through each step so that we can understand the gaps and the pain points in the process. It is shocking to see how the process of choice making becomes so difficult for these students.

As Is Scenario

We mapped out the opportunity points that could transform the finding and decision making journey of students.

Designing new ways to search and choose a learning resources

Big Ideas and Low-fi | Ideate
To build from the insights generated in user scenarios, we started ideating on potential features that can help us bring meaningful outcomes for our students. We explored 3 major features →
  • Recommender System - Enter your profession, proficiency level, and skills on onboarding in a few steps to get a personal learning plan.
  • Rate my Course - Students can leave comments about each course they have taken before, rating system can let more people know about those high-quality courses.
  • Finding Workshop - Optimising the user journey of finding workshops by adding more features that help them make a more informed choice.

Improving the flow and Simplifying the Experience

Mid Fidelity | Prototype
Going ahead, we improved our user flow and simplified user experience for our mid-fidelity designs.  →
  • Login and Onboarding -Users can simply sign in with the school portal and select the interested domain to get an initial list of recommended courses to explore
  • Finding Resources -This feature gives more accurate and simple filters for users to find targeted information. Students can find as many possible resources as per their needs. Essential information and detailed description helps users shortlist and register for a courses
  • Rate My Course -Right from the main home page, students can find prompts to share their experiences about the workshop. Students can leave comments to help other users in the community to find their right resource. They can also find peer with similar interests to connect with despite being only one day on campus.
Upon our development, we mapped out another scenario to evaluate whether our ideas would help out students like Mia in their journey of finding the right learning resource.

Improve User Journey

Conducting Evaluations with part-time students

User Testing | Test
We recruited six participants in total and used two methods: observational session and interview based on our inclusion criteria. We coded three major issues we found through the usability test. 
  • Issue 1: Ambiguous onboarding process -
We redesigned the login so that an existing UofT student can easily login with their utorid id which will help the app receive imp info about their program and existing learning plans. 
  • Issue 2: Confusing Feedback Process -
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We made the feedback process a rewarding experience that helps students find peers that attended the same workshop. We also added a simple reminder: Did you attend the workshop? on the main feed.
We made the filtering process integrated into the journey of looking for workshops. Users can easily access them from different screens of the search process and they are minimally designed and organized to ease decision-making.  

Reflecting Back

Weaving Narratives.

​During sprint reviews with industry experts from Google, and IBM, I curated and presented project pitches within 8 mins. This is a really insightful experience to learn how to present the important aspects, frame the right insights into a story, and share focused decisions. 

Collaborative Approach

 I learned how to strategize and curate important tasks to facilitate a collaborative and creative approach. It was a very rewarding experience to learn how to leverage everyone's capabilities and synthesize ideas and solutions together.
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User Testing and Iteration

During the process of design, we emphasized on user testing in the last phase but it facilitated the most enhancement and improvement in our designed solution. In the future, I would aim to run sprints with different testing methods in both ideate and prototype phase.