UX Case Study: Fun People
Implemented by Ironhack Miami
In this case study I’ll be showcasing our design process in taking Fun People’s engaging in- person workshop camps, into an online experience.
Project contributors: Robert Zamora & Andrea Marquez
Client
Fun People Inc. is an educational company born in 2014. They currently offer in-person course for outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching people additional skills.
Brief
Fun People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the workshop camp.transform the in-person learning experience into a 100% digital experience, so people with less time and financial resources can join.
Deliverables
- Insights from Discovery phase
- Features Prioritization and Roadmap
- Mid-fidelity wireframes
- Working prototype of at least 1 viewport size
- Report & Presentation
- Testing and iterations documentation
- Learning and next steps log
Research
Fun People wants to expand their market reach, by breaking in to an online medium. In order to do this, we needed to asses their current position in the market and breakdown, Fun People as a business.
We broke down their business identity using a SWOT analysis. Highlighting the key business strengths, Weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
Competitors & Feature Comparison
For competitors we looked at names we know as strong contenders in the online workshop space, and found them to be:
- SkillShare
- Domestika
- CreateLive
We then broke them down by their features in order to see what were the common points across the three, and what they were lacking. This could then help ideate solutions and features that we would want to bring to Fun People.
We then used that data from our SWOT and Feature comparison, to craft the Market position map you see here. With it we pinpointed where in the market Fun People currently resides and where it will be heading by incorporating our solutions.
User Research
Now that we understood Fun People from a business perspective, our next step was to send out surveys and conduct interviews to find our target user.
To organize our survey we utilized a lean survey canvas to plot out information we needed to obtain. We needed to find users who had done workshops in person, what they liked about them, what types of workshop was it for, and how they felt about possibly using an online medium.
We collected quantitative data from 100 individuals:
- We found 78% of participants had taken workshops in IT & Web skills
- A large percentage of participants shared common pain points of time restrictions and cost
- And majority felt personal engagement, and hands on practices were beneficial to their learning experience
We then went in deeper during the interview phase, so we could find the reasoning behind the users pain points and possible opportunities that could be found using online workshops.
Define
Taking the quantitative data from surveys and the qualitative data from interviews, we constructed and organized the affinity map shown here.
As you can see we found common topics like collaboration, expectations for online courses, learning approaches, and along with multiple paint points to address.
Based on our grouping and date in our affinity map, empathized further with our user. Seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, and learning the goals they want to achieve. To visualize this we made this empathy map shown here.
Personas
With the data collected and organized, we identified that our user is in the workforce, and is looking for advancement in their career or even just for themselves.
Since Fun People offers a wide variety of workshops, we decided to focus on individuals who want to advance their creative and tech skills.
With that we constructed our primary user persona, Rework Rebecca. She’s a passionate and committed community manager, that wants to expand her creative skill sets. Rebecca is a social butterfly, and often relies on the interaction, and communication of others to keep her interested and engaged on projects. And due to her job duties, she needs guidance and structure to get her to her goals.
Aside from our Primary, Rebecca, we had insights from our research that felt it would be important to identify another persona. With that we crafted Distant Dennis. He has recently lost his job moved back with his family, so his free time his, to use to the fullest. Aside from time constraints, Dennis differs from Rebecca in that he likes to work at his own pace, and like to self teach and self guide his learning efforts.
User Journey
Since we know that designing for Rebecca, will still help Dennis, we focused on her needs and developed a scenario to tell her story.
As we already know, Rebecca is committed to her job, but she’s having frustrations with colleagues not seeing her creative vision on projects. Rebecca wants to develop her creative skills so that way she can better showcase her ideas and find new opportunities in her field.
Problem Statement & MVP
Ideation
When started ideating, we constructed a Lean UX canvas to organize and map the direction of our ideations.
This lead us to constructing 3 How Might We’s the encapsulated our problems that we needed to solve for Rebecca and other users like her.
Since we organized the ideations by their problems; we separated them in to levels of priority by using the MOSCOW method.
We knew that there were a lot of things we could add and address in the app, but with this chart we sorted the level of need that our users were facing. This would then carry in to our prototypes.
Site Map
Now that we had what solutions we needed; we created this site map to illustrate where these solutions would be placed and organized.
Task Analysis & User Flow
For the task analysis we broke it down in to two flows: Class search and enrollment, and course interaction.
The course interaction included finding a lecture, submitting your assignment, and then finding feedback on your submitted work.
We combined the two tasks in to one flow. Highlighting the points of action and the subsequents screens that followed due to those actions.
Wireframing & Prototyping
From our ideation sketches and brainstorming, we built a quick lo- fi prototype to test the user flow. We tested on 4 users, and gained good insight in terms of flow time, and possible UI inputs/ modifications to take in to account.
We needed to simplify the flow with less screens and make the navigations more obvious for the users.
For usability tests, we moved on to Mid fidelity wireframes, and created a prototype in InVision.
From there we conducted 5 interviews as well as a maze test. This way we captured both quantitative and qualitative data.
In the interviews we found that users were able to conduct the flow with relative ease, but we did find pain points in the type of icons we used, as well as locations of certain features. For example, though all the users were able to locate the community feature, the did not recognize the icon, only assumed that was the screen because the other ones were more obvious.
Based of the insights from the usability tests we made the follow changes:
- We added descriptions to the bottom of each icon, so that they are more identifiable
- Instead of moving to the next lesson in the lecture screen, we changed it to move to the assignment page.
Next Steps
For next steps we’ll tackle solutions to problems that we ranked lower on our MOSCOW METHOD. Such as:
- Interactive Calendar & Alerts
- Multiple language options
- Class exhibitions
- Downloadable class content
- Company organized meetups
Extras
Though we had completed the deliverables for this project. We decided to go a step further and create the app in Hi- Fidelity.
