School 21
student platform
about
my role
"School 21" is an educational project of Sberbank aimed at training IT specialists from scratch.
Product Designer (2021—2023)
Education is conducted according to the Peer-to-Peer method: no teachers and mandatory lectures. Students themselves decide when to come to campus and complete assignments, and other students act as reviewers.
Great emphasis is placed on gamification: each student has his own level, which grows like in a video game.
I was involved in the development of the design system and functionality, conducted research (interviews and usability testing), developed wireframes, layouts and controlled implementation.
Goals
1
The development team needs to create and improve features based on key metrics: platform satisfaction and internship acceptance rate.
2
Based on research, find out what students lack for comfortable learning. Development team and business customers had hypotheses, but they needed to be tested.
I designed main functionality
Dashboard
Students get here after authorization. Dashboard allows students to quickly find out what projects they are working on.
Below there are upcoming events (Events), schedule for the day (Agenda) and recently received achievements (Badges).
Calendar
Here students can create slots for reviewing projects, in which those who need review will sign up. And then from here (or from the dashboard) go to checking the project.
It is also convenient to keep track of events in the calendar and leave feedback on past events.
Profile
Evaluating the profile, students select partners for team projects.
Here students can see information about projects in progress, about their education progress and how often they come in campus.
Project map is one of the main screens in all platform. Here students can track their overall score on the platform.
Each hexagon is a project, and the fill represents a status. Figure inside a hexagon - type of project (individual, team, exam)
Over the past two years, we seriously redesigned this screen. Added several features to understand the current progress.
Projects
Here students can see status of their projects (tasks), and also see projects that recommended to start.
UX-
research
research
surveys
interview
One of our main tools. We quickly found that our users are active and willing to help us improve the product. Surveys have revealed many weaknesses in current and proposed solutions.
Research played a key role in the development. We received feedback from users on a variety of issues, from measuring the usability of existing features to wishes for the future.
We personally came to one of the campuses of the "School 21" and held meetups where we communicated with users. With pizza and coffee, great ideas were born and then became new features.
Identified issues
At first it was not entirely obvious, but the students lacked a mobile web version or application.
1
We lacked our own convenient tool for conducting surveys within the platform itself.
2
We found out that it is necessary to make significant improvements to the current UI, as well as develop and implement new features.
3
A lot of students came to campuses in the evening and at night, after their main work. They lack the dark mod.
4
7.1
out of 10 possible points
platfrom scored in one of the first surveys.
The task was to improve User Satisfaction Score.
Adaptive
versions
versions
Created adaptive version of the platform for different devices. The interface has been adapted for smartphones as well as tablets in book and portrait orientations.
Functional improvements
“Always in the know”
Within the team, we adhered to the concept of “Always in the know”. This means that at any time the student should understand why he cannot perform a particular action or what state the platform is in.
A large area of work concerned improvements to existing functionality. All extra features were developed carefully so as not to damage the already debugged user experience. Periodic usability testing helped us with this.
To do this, we have developed an extensive system of tips, reminders and notifications both inside the interface and in the form of a mailing list.
100%
functionality was affected by changes as part of the development of the “Always in the know” concept. Below are just a few examples.
Students can see on the main page what they need to do to pass the next education deadline.
Added project pipeline. Students just visit project page to see what status the project is in and what are the deadlines for each status.
Modal windows have been seriously redesigned. Firstly, we worked with the text - we added comprehensive explanations of any actions. Secondly, we revised the very essence of modal windows. Each serious action (restarting the project, deleting or changing something) must be separately confirmed. This significantly reduced the damage from random destructive actions.
online reviews
During COVID-19, one of the important tasks was to transfer peer-to-peer project reviews to an online format. This could be possible thanks to API integration with the "Jazz" video conferencing service.
We thought over the full flow of online checks and conveniently integrated them into the platform. Now students could decide for themselves how to conduct tests: face-to-face on campus or online.
During the registration for the test, the student can turn on the “Online Peer Review” switcher. After that, it will be possible to conduct an online check.
Before starting the test, we show detailed instructions with the necessary actions. By following a simple 4-step process, students completed online assessments without visiting campus.
Exam tests
Working closely with the business customer and taking into account all the wishes, we designed a convenient functionality for testing students from scratch. Such tests were conducted on the eve of full-fledged exams in order to check the learned material.
Administrators can add a wide variety of question types to a test, from standard single-choice questions to group sorting and match matching types of question.
Survey
Tool
Tool
We designed our own survey tool. Students no longer had to click on third-party links. Surveys are integrated into the platform interface, which helped us achieve greater student involvement in the research.
Dark Mod
Many students come to the campus in the evening and at night, after their main work or study. They were not very comfortable working with the standard light theme of the platform.
The release of the dark theme quite by accident turned out to be on the eve of Halloween, which made the innovation especially atmospheric :)
Results
I can write that the set goals have been achieved, but let me tell you the main indicators of what we have achieved in two years:
out of 10 points, the service scored in a survey at the end of 2022. For almost two years, we have seriously improved the opinion of users about the platform.
makes up the percentage of those who are invited for an internship while still studying.
students are learned on our platform. In 2022, the team completely transferred all students from the old platform to the new one.
8.8
2.500 +
75%
