Instro provides an easy and efficient way to search for an instructor, enroll for a pilot session and schedule classes for learning a skill. One can also be an instructor and leverage their skills using the same platform.
KEY CONTRIBUTIONS
- Conducted research by interviewing various students and instructors
- Brainstormed solutions, created storyboards, and ideated the details of the final solution based on the research insights and goals
- Created user flow and created paper and high fidelity prototypes
- Conducted user and expert evaluations of the product
Overview
PROBLEM SPACE
People often want to pursue their hobbies or follow their passion, but they give up due to lack of motivation or a push.
The ones who are motivated, however, find it difficult to find a right instructor who can teach them at their pace, understand their way of learning and most importantly, who is reliable and trustworthy.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Easing process of finding a suitable instructor who is skilled, verified and nearby.
THE SOLUTION
Instro is an application that efficiently connects the learners with suitable instructors from their social circle and vicinity. Learners can make an informed search for instructors teaching a particular skill and enroll for in-person sessions with them.
There is more!
This application also helps users in leveraging their skills by allowing them to be an instructor on the same platform.
User’s Homepage
Design Process
UNDERSTAND
Data Gathering
WHY
Many self-learning platforms, teaching various skills, are available in the market.
We conducted research
- to understand the gaps in these platforms
- to know the learner’s expectations from them.
Insights
PROBLEMS WITH THE EXSISTING PLATFORMS
We asked the participants about their opinions about the current learning platforms available. Here is what they said…
USER EXPECTATIONS
When asked about their expectations, they raised a number of points mentioned below…
ANALYZE
Design Goals
We derived four goals that our solution should strive to achieve, based on the insights we gathers from our research.
COMPATABLITY – Facilitate compatibility between the instructor and learner
AUTHENTICITY – Authenticate instructors and their skillset
TRUST – Build trust between the learner and instructor
ENGAGING EXPERIENCE – Provide a more engaging and personalized experience to learners
The Dilemma
But the scope is too
W I D E
We realized that the scope of the project is too broad in terms of users and skills
1. USER BASE TOO LARGE
Another round of interviews helped us to understand the intentions of learning new skills amongst the individuals
Students wanted a formal education, in a classroom like setting, as they usually choose it as a career path.
Whereas working individuals
- are looking for informal type of learning experience
- have time on weekends and passion to pursue their hobbies
- Find it tedious to look for instructors when they move to new city
Therefore we first
Scoped down the user base
2. TOO MANY SKILLS ON PLATFORM
We conducted a survey that listed categories of skills like communication skills, indoor sports, outdoor sports, vocational skills, hobbies, music, art, etc.
Music was one most popular skill people wanted to learn asa hobby and preferred to learn in a in-person setting as well
Hence we selected ‘learning musical instruments’ as a scope to establish a right direction for our our solution
Final project scope and constraints
- Focusing on one skill at the beginning
It will be a great to understand what works and what doesn’t with one skill and then extending the platform to other skillsets.
- Platform only connects the learner and instructor, does not provide a platform for learning
This platform will not provide any tools to conduct sessions only. It will serve only to connect the learner and instructor
Once solved our dilemma and scoped down our project, we built our user persona and finalized our problem statement
PERSONA
Problem Statement
How Might We Leverage The Social-Collaborative System That Connects The Learners To Instructors Effectively
DEFINE
Ideation
BRAINSTORMING
Keeping our 4 design goals in mind and our problem statement handy we started our brainstorming process.
Our approach was to brainstorm ideas for each of our user goals and pick the best fit amongst it. Later combine the best idea of each goal and form our final solution.
STORYBOARDING
IDEATING THE FEATURES
Once again, based on the goals, we filtered our ideas to include following key requirements of our design
A TYPICAL USER FLOW ON THE APPLICATION
We tried to sketch out how a typical user’s flow will be on our application. It represents the steps a regular user will take
to search for an instructor and schedule sessions.
STUDENT ONBOARDING USERFLOW
According to Key feature 5, to make the instructors understand their students better, we thought of having an onboarding questionnaire for students, that includes questions on their personality type, special needs, etc.
They will be shared only with the concerned instructor
INSTRUCTOR ONBOARDING USERFLOW
PROTOTYPE
Wireframing
We started off with paper prototypes to chalk out our key screens. We kept on iterating them until we arrived at out final screens
Here are a few sketches of our paper prototypes.
PAPER PROTOTYPES
COLOR PALETTE
Most of the educational platforms are in BLUE as it brings out productivity in an individual and helps improve reading comprehension and thought processes.
But our application is not aiming to be a learning platform.
TYPOGRAPHY
We opted for a modern sans-serif font style as we are targeting the younger user group.
Our choice was the font family Outfit as gave a modern and more friendly sense to the text and went well with our designs
FINAL SOLUTION
instro
A social-collaborative platform that efficiently connects the learners with suitable instructors
KEY FEATURES
Instro enables its users to
- Search for an instructor for any musical instrument. Instructors are listed from user’s social circle and vicinity, derived from their Facebook/Instagram account and current location
- Browse through the instructor’s profile consisting of skill information, images and videos of skill demonstration, student reviews and peer endorsements
- Book a pilot and schedule for classes
- Chat with the instructor to discuss coursework
Instructor Profile
About
- Instructor’s background and skill information
- Teaching techniques and descriptions
Gallery
- Images and videos of skill demonstration
Review
- Review and ratings from students
- Only students can write reviews
Peer Endorsement
- Endorsements from peers, per request
- Peers should have matching skillsets to endorse
Scheduling a pilot Session
Student Onboarding
Future Scope
- Platform can be extended to cater to other skills like sports, art, driving, etc.
- Instructors can be evaluated for their ability to teach students with special needs.
MY LEARNINGS
- Scoping down the project is important
Our initial scope of the project was too broad in terms of what kind of skills will be included in our solution as different skills have different ways of learning. Narrowing down the scope to effectively communicate learners expectations and the learning settings was one of the main challenges of this project. - Reiterating the design
Reiteration to revise the design goals was one of the many exercises our team followed to ensure that we are properly addressing the user needs and requirements. It helped us in rethinking some of the features of our application.