the challenge
Create a math app for students in grade 3 - 6 that improves mental math capabilities, is fun and personalizes the math experience.
impact
Pair Wit helps as a supplementary tool because students are allowed to learn harder concepts easier by working on the basics. Students who enjoy PvP and RPG video games will be able to test their skills amongst friends while having the system identify and strengthen problem areas.
The product
Pair Wit, supported by empathy, user research, user journey mapping, low-high fidelity wireframing, prototyping and educational research.
Setting up the sprint
Given 4 weeks to tackle the project, I chose these 4 phases to split my workload. As I kept working, some steps bled into each other but this guide helped to accountable for my process, knowing I had a deadline not far off.
RESEARCH
I started by focusing on gathering insights from the people around me. I originally started with the idea that I wanted to make the app strictly for children who did not learn from the traditional education systems. I based my questions and research process on that while keeping track of any new developments along the way.
class interviews
I started my approaching those within my classroom to find out where they had the most difficulties in math when growing up and why.
Key Insight: Math never stops being a problem that cannot be improved upon. Abstractions are visualization of math can prove difficult at all levels of math.
student interviews
After my initial phase of gathering from people around me, I had to hear from my target audience themselves. Luckily, I had to chance to ask the kids of an old employer where they had the most difficulty in math. A bonus is that I helped with teaching them math and know they prefer gaming to math homework.
Key Insight: Division (especially long division) is a point of pain for the students I had to interview.
teachers & tutor INterviews
With an idea of what pain problems my target audience has with math, I looked into methodology of teaching to make it understandable. Having the teachers & tutors articulate how to solve problems aided in getting my project moving.
Key Insights: Students need to tackle multiple questions in order to understand and make the math automatic. Having strong fundamentals on addition and multiplication help with understanding subtraction and division.
parent interviews
My last touch point of my initial researching phase. Parents were able to articulate new ways that they got their children to be more involved in learning.
Key Insights: Parents noticed that their children respond better to educational tools that are fun, relative to their interests and have some sort of application in the world around them.
Personas
The personas became a way of understanding how to solve my problems. They offered a way of being easier to empathize with my potential users.
Key Insight: Starting with these user personas allowed me to generate someone to empathize with. When I had a lack of actual flesh and body users for a certain time periods, these helped me go back to why and who I am making the application for.
inspirational teaching philosophy
After having a better understanding of who I was making my material for, I had to really figure out what the best teaching methods to use. Based on my initial stage of research, I started exploring different methods and came across Sugata Mitra's philosophies of self learning in younger student.
Key Insights: Given the change to be left along, children have an amazing ability to self learn, without the aid of an adult directing their learning path. Through peer interaction and the change to struggle with the material, students can be less restricted. The rest of my work started to be catered towards this philosophy.
Main Competitive Analysis
During my time spent analyzing people making changes in this space, I found these three particularly useful in how they get students to learn.
Key Takeaways: Taking a look at all three of these, I wanted to integrate machine learning, gamification and a learning structure that helps develop math skills while remaining interesting and fun.
User Flows
My user flow evolved throughout my work process as I continued doing testing but I had given myself a starting point to base my initial stages of my design.
The Lowest of Low Fidelity
I had gotten into the habit of blasting out low fidelity sketches. I got to test out both how my element would fit on the page and different concepts at difference steps.
Key Takeaway: I was able to get an idea of testing out concepts with individuals. By labeling my wireframes with a number system (ie. 3a(i)) I could easily re-organize my testing when going from person to person. Cut out my time needed to move into my phase of wireframing. These tests helped me to understand that there is no one right method for people to understand math.
Wireframing
After falling behind due to illness, at this point I fell behind on my Sprint plan. Luckily for me, I had tested my functionality of my lower fidelities before falling ill so I was able to plug and play my wireframes to see how much space they occupied.
Key Takeaway: I used the wireframes as a starting point for my high fidelity. I did not have to spend a lot of time in this section but it was good to have down so that I could go into my branding phase and then plug and play when I did my high fidelity.
Branding
voice & tone
- Fun but not wacky
- Informal but not infantalizing
- Helpful but not snotty
- Weird but not inappropriate
- Confident but not arrogant
- Instructional but not monotons
Key Takeaways: The voice and tone helped within the next step of determining a mascot for Pair Wit and how we speak to our youth audience.
first Round MASCOT discovery
With the concept of machine learning, I started researching animals that are used in the educational field.
choosing the right mascot
Getting to the domain of birds, their properties and mannerisms aligned with my overall branding.
The Winning Mascot: The parrot became a metaphor for machine learning because of their ability to imitate human language. They also inspired the name "Pair Wit" because it is a play on the word parrot and going with the core concept of pairing the user and the machine learning together. The vibrant colours also helped to inspire my colour palette.
high fidelity
Based on the testing and research, I put the basic colour scheme of the parrot with elements of popular gaming formats, such as RPG and PvP.
Key Takeaway: After testing on users, there were issues that they had with the battle system. There was hesitation of where the answer appears and what type of action they were allowed.
Current prototyped version
final thoughts
The project was a great way for me to start to fine tune my process as a designer. Principles that I will continue using are to always seek feedback, always be ready to reiterate, make a sprint plan and rely on my ability to put it all together. I am still growing as a designer and know the work is never done but it can be deliverable.