Brief

Skill Ocean is a platform for people from all ages to explore more than just school studies. The platform encourages users to exchange their skills and strengths with each other to learn new things from one another.

Problem Statement

Lots of online learning platforms are rising nowadays, but one of the major disadvantage is that users cannot interact with real people in real time. We wanted to solve these problems by making a platforms for all users to be teachers and exchange their skills for things that they want to learn from other people. Within the circle, users not only can save money from buying expensive online courses but also have the opportunity to learn things from the best in the fields.

Challenges

1. Help users find their learning partners easily and correctly suits their learning needs.
2. Personalize learning experience.
3. Easy to use for all ages and all learning fields.

Research

We made a user survey to understand more about our potential users and the problems they may have. About 50 responses were recorded. And based on the responses, we concluded our insights.

Quantitative Research

1. Most of our potential users are willing to interact with others and are also willing to learn new things of their own accord.
2. Some of them already have some self-taughted experiences, including participating in study clubs, using online learning platforms and watching free tutorials.
3. The survey confirmed that most of the users are expecting to have a mobile app that could make their learning processes much more convenient.

Interviews

In order to get a solid understanding of how our potential users are thinking, we conducted 4 face-to-face interview with them.
Our interviewees are college students, aging from 21 years old to 25 years old. All of them have some online learning experiences but they all used different platforms.
We found that all of them are really willing to try out skill exchanging because it is free. At the same time, we also found out that although they are all really outgoing, they still care about the people they are going to meet up with, they are concerned that whether their partners can really teach them the skills they want to learn and they can get along or not.

Define

We created personas to understand more about the user's problems, and we sumed up our design inspirations.
We also did a card-sorting interview with our interviewees, to see whether our design fits their expectation.

Ideation

We settled our ecosystem to learn more about the domain, task flows to align design decisions with user's behavior, and information architecture to understand the domain and IA which forms the basis for the app.

Branding

To make our platform more appealing, a suitavle brand is definitely a must. We believe that the brand should be friendly for users since we want them to feel comfortable; at the same time, the brand represent a connection via knowledges, so we think the brand should also look professtional.

Prototype

I developed a click-through prototype on Figma to conduct usability tests. We mapped out a user testing plan, designed several tasks in the prototype, observed users completing the tasks through screen sharing on zoom, and asked for feedback at the end. We received good and surprising reactions and also some areas of improvement which I later implements into the final design. I really enjoyed talking to users, showing them the new design, and seeing their reactions. It motivates me to make thoughtful design decisions that benefit my users.

Reflection

The project helped me dig into the process of design thinking framework and work with different roles in a project. I designed most of the UI, so I learned how to implement design guidelines and develop a user-friendly application. Moreover, since this is my first time cooperating with a team to do a UI/UX project, I think the most critical thing I've learned is the importance of delivering ideas clearly to avoid misunderstandings and being effective. Or else the processes may take too long and leave us no time to revise.

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