Designlab, a mentor led education platform that teaches design, needed help in defining their product strategy and developing their design curriculum. Human Centered Design methods guided our process.
My role was to improved the syllabus of the current month-long course by increasing engagement & retention with more hands-on exercises and better scope of content.
Challenge
How might we develop an online design program that is inspired by offline institutions?
I conducted interviews and designed surveys targeted to teachers from offline institutions, Designlab mentors and students
I created surveys that were sent out to Designlab mentors asking them about the problems they have been facing throughout the course.I also took the chance to ask them about their previous design education (For example:What was their favorite courses? Or worse course ever?
Example of the interview questions I asked to typography teachers
Survey questions that I asked mentors of Designlab
I looked into different design curriculums from different design schools and found recurring topics and courses that were in common.
Designing personas was very important in my process in order to improve the course, exercise and product experience
Persona 1: Unicorn Designer
Persona 2: The Design Entrepreneur
I also created user flows and mockups of how people would interact and complete these tracks and exercises on the designlab platform
User Flow 1
User Flow 2: Step 1
User Flow 2: Step 2
User Flow: Step 3
Concepts
After diving into the redesign of the curriculum, I proposed solutions to the product experience:
We found out that scheduling appointments were a pain so we came up with a scheduling system
Dashboard 1: Scheduling Page
We also found out that tracking students progress was really important so we came up with a progress bar. We found out that tracking mentors progress was as important so we improved the mentors dashboard where a mentor can view his/her latest students, share resources of the course with other mentors and keep track of their hangout session with students through a calendar
Dashboard 2: Student Page
While talking to mentors we found out that commenting on students work could be improved by changing the layout a little. Giving more space for mentors to comment was necessary
New Student Project Page Sketch
I also proposed a new design with new features for the mentors dashboard. The focus was on resources that mentor can share with other mentors, progress bars and calendars
