Qualifica Cursos
How might we prioritize 5 critical improvements for the app?
Company
mLearn Educação Móvel, Brazilian company
Product: Qualifica Cursos, an application aiming to evolve and transform people's lives with education.
Team
Me as the Product Designer working collaboratively with Developer, Product Manager, Data Scientist, and CPO.
Year
2019
My role
Product Design (research, user flow, wireframes, prototyping, and usability testings)
Challenge
When I started my job at the company, my challenges were: what is Qualifica and who are its users? What are the main problems the product aren't solving? And what improvements should be prioritized?
Project goal
- Find the critical problems of the app.
- Get to know about the product and users' behaviours and their experiences with the app.
- Define and prioritize product improvements.
Solution
New onboarding screens and login flow, new course details page, home page now are personalized with courses categories the people are more interested to learn.
Project summary
Understanding the context, Framing the problem, Tangibilizing hypothesis, Validating solutions, Solutions Impact, and Learnings.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study. All information is own my own and does not necessarily reflect the views or actions of Qualifica.
Understanding the context
What are the main usability problems that Qualifica has?
To perform the usability analysis with a fresh eye, I drew on the usability principles of Nielson's heuristics:
What are the user's main pain points?
I got deep into learning everything about the business and users' goals. Then, I also collaborated with the Customer Success team to help me understand the main and current users' pain points. They were:
- Information about the app benefits wasn't clear;
- Billing problems.
I also collaborated with the Chief Product Officer (CPO) to create a quantitative research aiming to get more demographic information. (Quantitative Research Results in Portuguese: Check it on).
The main online research result was:
People want more options for courses and free courses in the app to enter the job market.
Digging deep into the users' needs
I did qualitative research by interviewing users to find out more about their context, needs and motivations. During the interviews, I also asked them to navigate the app so that I could learn about some behaviors and validate my usability analysis assumptions.
Some tasks were:
- How can you find a course you are interested in?
- Where do you find the course certificates?
- Please find the Student Card and Benefits Club (app's benefits).
I recruited 10 participants, six who were already using the app and four participants who had not yet enrolled in Qualifica, to get a fresh look at the platform from a non-bias perspective. The research findings were:
100%
participants found difficulty to find courses.
100%
participants who had not yet joined the app, did not know where to find the benefits app
70%
participants tried to find the certificates on the course page (they were on the profile page).
Let's bring data to the table: what is going on?
Collaborating with the Data Scientist, CPO, and the Product Manager we analyzed the data using Firebase and Appsee tools:
In addition, of the people who access the application,
65%
reached the homepage
52%
opened the course details page
54%
of those people enrolled in a course
Framing the problem
Based on the results of the survey and data analysis, we found many improvements to meet users' needs.
Collaborating with the CPO, defining the main goals of the app and building how-to questions with the team, we defined the most critical issues to be solved:
Why are the main objectives of Qualifica - exploring courses, enrolling in courses and completing their studies - not being achieved?
- How might we help users access the homepage faster?
- How might we help users to explore courses easily?
- How might we ensure users feel interested in enrolling on courses?
- How might we get users to engage and complete courses?
Tangibilizing solutions
I created a user flow to better understand the users' path in the app with some hypothetical solutions for each research question:
1. How might we help users access the homepage faster?
Login speed
In addition to the development team working on login speed, to decrease the bounce rate, I proposed moving the login/registering path after the users access some parts of the app, such as course details page, profile page, and sidebar menu.
New onboarding screens and login flow
To test if the users will less interacting with the onboarding pages without mobile screenshots and if they could quickly skip the onboarding screens to access the main page.
2. How might we help users to explore courses easily?
Bringing back the results of the qualitative, quantitative and usability analysis, I used the framework Job To Be Done to consolidate people's need when looking for a course:
When accessing the app for the first time, I want to choose which course categories to show on the home page. And I also want to be able to change them at any time. This way, I can effortlessly explore all the available courses and by course categories I am most interested in learning at the moment.
3. How might we ensure users feel interested in enrolling on courses?
Aiming to help users' plan their studies, collaborating with the developer team, we decided to insert more detailed information about the course.
4. How might we get users to engage and complete courses?
This problem was prioritised for further exploration in collaboration with the Content Team.
Validating solutions
To validate the hypothetical solutions, I made user testings with 5 participants. After that, my team and I defined the TOP 5 improvements to Qualifica Cursos app.
What if we change the login flow?
1. How might we help users access the homepage faster?
"I prefer to check this information in the app stores before downloading the app."
_User Testing participant
0% participants went through the onboarding screens. The screens were adapted to the App Stores and the new login flow solution was not prioritized for the complexity and business priority.
The TOP 1 improvement is:
Improve Login delaying to users access the content app faster
What if users' could choose the course categories they are most interested in?
2. How might we help users to explore courses easily?
The solution had 100% success in the user testing.
And my team and I defined the next TOP improvements:
- TOP 2
Include the selection of the interested course category
to users find featured courses related to their course interest areas on the home page. - TOP 3
Include their chosen categories of interested courses on the home page
the users can choose which course categories will be shown on the home page. - TOP 4
“Discover Courses” page creation
to the users explore effortless all courses available and by courses categories.
What if we provided more useful and attractive information about the courses?
3. How might we ensure users feel interested in enrolling on courses?
“Those information about the course helps me to plan my studies.”
_ User Testing participant
TOP 5
Course details page redesign
to convert more users to enrol a course.
Solutions impact
298%
the access on the course details page increased
294%
the monthly active users' (MAU) increased
276%
the access on the homepage increased
50%
engagement increased
42%
users' satisfaction increased
★★★★★4.8
rating store increased from 3.6 to 4.3 and to 4.8 a few months later
Learnings
I learned to look first at the quantitative data to understand what is happening and do the qualitative research to understand why something is happening.
In addition, including the whole team from the beginning of the project was fundamental to define the most critical problem considering different perspectives of areas of expertise, and it was determinant to prioritize together the TOP 5 improvements considering the technological constraints.