Role

UX Designer and Prototyping

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Duration

Aug. 2024 - Ongoing

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Team

Self-directed with guidance from a project manager and a content writer

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An Overview 👀

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The Juice Learning is a company focused on enhancing young students' reading skills and critical thinking through daily news stories crafted by experienced educators, journalists, and technologists. Their platform serves both students, who actively engage with the stories, and teachers or school districts, who fund student access and use these resources to integrate current events into their curriculum.

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What am I trying to Accomplish? 📚

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The primary goal of this project was to enhance teacher engagement and usage within The Juice Learning platform by implementing gamification techniques to make educational content more interactive and enjoyable.

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Identify Objectives 🎯

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This project began with a competitive analysis of 13 educational platforms to explore gamification's impact on learning engagement. This analysis provided insights into standard user experiences with gamification in the education market and helped identify effective features.

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Effective features:

Learning streak, in-game currency, XP, badges, leaderboard

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Avoid:

Excessive gamifications, clusttered interface

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Through collaboration with stakeholders and teacher feedback, two key objectives were identified:

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(1) Motivating teachers to assign articles to students, fostering consistent usage among students

(2) Encouraging teachers to incorporate The Juice stories into lesson plans, thereby increasing teachers’ overall engagement.

The Problem ❓

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Despite the platform's potential for educational impact, teacher engagement and story assignment rates were lower than anticipated. Teachers expressed a need for better content organization tools and guidance on integrating The Juice into lesson plans.

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Pain Points 📖

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• Insufficient incentive structures to motivate regular story assignments to students.
• Lack of feedback mechanisms for understanding how teachers are using content or wish to engage with it further.

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Meet our User 👾

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My Solution 🗝️

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The project introduced several gamification-inspired features aimed at enhancing teacher engagement and incentivizing their interaction with the platform. I employed rapid prototyping to iterate on concepts and designs, allowing the team to quickly test and refine ideas during weekly team meetings.

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Teacher Tags 🏷️

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A flexible tagging system allowing teachers to organize and annotate stories for lesson planning, curriculum development, and sharing with other teachers.

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Content Bundling 🗂️

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Feature enabling teachers to create and save custom story bundles, facilitating easy access for future lesson planning, with the added option to browse popular bundles from other educators.

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Teacher Community 🏫

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A dedicated area where teachers can engage through leaderboards, progress tracking, and recognition sections to see achievements, encouraging collaboration and sharing.

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Gamification Rewards 🏅

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In-game currency (gems) and badges awarded for tagging, bundling, and assigning stories, which can be redeemed for tangible rewards.

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Value of the New Features💰

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For Teachers

Simplified lesson planning, new content discovery tools, and visualizations for class participations within the teacher community.

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For Students

Improved content assignments when learning school materials and broaden exposure to current events.

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For The Juice

Valuable usage insights from teacher activity data, enabling content and marketing strategies based on educators' preferences and behaviors.

Next Steps 🚀

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The team is currently collaborating with the development team to define implementation milestones and ensure a smooth transition from design to development.

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To be continued...

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