Custom study plans
Empowering medical students to create their own study plans and structure their studies, while also providing them with recommendations for their further development.
- my role
Product designer - company
AMBOSS - team
8 persons squad from product manager to devs + stakeholders - problem
How might we help students prepare for their exams in one unified place? - solution
Provide a flexible and customizable study plan with enough structure and recommendations - live link
Link to the product
Discovery
So what stops users from using their subscription/trial?
- They keep getting distracted and can’t find a structure. The pick-your-own-adventure path is cumbersome to figure out.
- They are using some other resource. Still want to do it, but want to do other things more.
- Super busy, not able to make the time.
- Expectation mismatch.
What are the potential solutions to increase users activity?
- Onboard users so they know how to use the platform to the fullest.
- Motivate users with product copy, and gamification.
- Make a structured plan for users (with their input). Then remind them to follow it.
- Show progress over time, to show their movement towards a goal.
Research
After discussing and answering the main questions we decided to bet on a structured custom created study plan. With this in mind I started to collect everything that I can find on the topic, such as any possible user interviews, hotjar activity and literature. I tried to find possible pain points while observing users' activity. Also I made a competitors’ analysis - to see some common patterns on how people solved already existing problems. In parallel I’m always asking data analysts to provide possible findings related to the topic - user activity, areas of churns, conversion etc.
Brainstorming & first user testing
Questions:
- whether users want to have their university or us to be involved in their study plans
- how they want these study plans to be customized and in sync with their schedule
- which sources they would like to have within their study plans
Answers:
- students wanted to customize their own plan
- with smart AI recommendations.
Mapping out first concepts
On this stage I usually have a lot of back and forth with the PM, stakeholders and UR. We are shaping the direction, cutting unnecessary corners, understanding the steps of the flow.
Wireframes, testing
Together with the UR department I conducted user interviews either as an interviewer or note taker. As an outcome from interviews we usually have a deck with a detailed analysis of the interviews and suggested further steps.
Tech discussion, tickets
At some point when I feel that we are getting somewhere, I present upcoming feature for the team, where I include the PM, all the engineers, people from CRM, UX-copy, data. It’s high-level tech discussion to fuel developers' brains to think about upcoming work.
Hifi, illustrations and delivery
On this stage I examinate all the components we have in the project, I am creating a couple of proposals which I successively polish until they reach the final stage. Also on Hifi stage one should think about all the possible states of the components and animations between the screens. In addition to the UI, I created custom illustrations for this project.
Design documentation
After Hifies are produced, together with the team (Data science, FE, BE, QA, design) we create a solution design document, where we write down detailed technical parameters of what we need to achieve while working on the implementation of these hifies.
Implementation
Tickets with the final design version are going to sprints and I usually QA them from UI perspective. I truly believe that quality is coming from everybody in a team, so I insist on doing it. During this phase I’m working closely with developers and if they have questions we discuss them on the flight.
Launch and measuring the outcomes
For study plans we decided to have a soft launch for a small amount of existing users. We with UR wrote a couple of surveys to them.
Then we made an A/B testing for new and existing users to receive quantitative feedback.
Outcomes were impressive. We got lots of praise and positive feedback - together with wishes for further development.
Next steps and learnings
We collect and prioritise feedback from our users and we are making improvements based on this.
As a learning I would like to mention that, from trimming the feature too much we got to the point that we have to add an additional sprint to fix some obvious problems. Another learning is that we have to improve our communication between departments, our A/B test was moved for a week because of it. Also it seems like we could be better in drawing a real border between first phases (when we listen to feedback) and implementation phase.
Anyways it was a nice run, let’s do it again.
