🧑🔧 What is Meraki and its aim
Meraki is an online learning platform partnering with schools/NGOs/state governments to teach basic programming (in Python), English and typing for free to young kids from low-income families in India. It combines study material and online instructor led classes.
🔬 A big problem was making the students frustrated
The Operations team taking care of on-ground partnerships informed me that existing students were facing problems in enrolling to relevant classes from the app. This lead to missed Google Meets sessions and study time disruptions.
The design team decided to do user interviews (question guide and notes) with seven existing student users. Around seven interviews, the two volunteers (they did 4 interviews) and I started getting the same problem points that were:
- Difficulty in finding relevant classes to enrol as classes from various courses were visible to everyone in the scheduling interface
- Needed to enrol into every single class manually. The flagship course in Python had 23 classes which meant a lot of enrolments in the approximate 2 months course duration
- For revisions, students had to request a separate class from the teacher and then repeat the enrolment process. The revision class would appear as a regular class on the interface without distinction
Challenge faced: Getting students to open up to their problems. Many were shy and had language barriers in English. Some students got exposed to technical education for the first time. The volunteers and I took a patient approach assuring the students that there is no right or wrong answer and gave them ample time to articulate their thoughts without fear.
🔬 Why was Meraki interested in solving this problem
Meraki is free for students and funded by CSR donations. The team wanted to solve the uncovered problem points to expand their operations. The existing version had served its purpose as a pilot version. Now, Meraki wanted to increase the funding and attract large government partners across India.
🔮 Was it all worth it?
- The outreach team successfully pitched Meraki to schools and onboarded Haryana (an Indian state) government as a partner in December 2021
- Meraki had 68.67% retention rate and 87.5% engagement rate for 17k+ active users post launch in March 2022
- Currently, Meraki has served 79k+ students in the last 12 months
- Meraki adopted a user-centered design approach and improved UX maturity through incorporating user feedback and research regularly
🕵️ So, what ideas helped to solve the problems?
During the process of uncovering the problems, I also updated the persona archetypes of the user base to: The Beginner in Tech and Headstarter in Technical Knowhow
After this, I did task analysis to introduce the solutions where students could now complete the tasks without facing the above problems. The designs are taking the example of Python course in Meraki.
Task 1: Enroling and attending a regular class
Students were now able to view only the batch they are supposed to learn in. They had to enrol to the batch once and all the class invites were generated in their google calendar.
Prototype - Enroling into a class
Task 2: Enroling and attending a revision class
Students no longer needed to ask teachers for creating revision classes. They could enrol to available classes on the same topic in another batch and take it at their conveniences.
Prototype - Taking a revision class
💡 What did the students say during testing and reception upon launch?
- In testing, the participants expressed joy at the ease of use and not having to enrol in the classes again and again for both regular and revision classes
- Upon launch, the immediate feedback by both students and teachers were positive as it saved their time. The active user numbers grew to 17k+ in the next few months. Usually, we had around 4k to 5k active users before this change