Dost Education — Tracy‘s Portfolio

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Overview

I spent a month to design for Dost Education — a non-profit organization in India, together with 2 other design students. During this 1-month project, we were able to design the first version of a mobile web content library based on insights gained through user survey, user testings and several design iterations. My role in this project includes collaborating with my teammates on drafting the user survey, user testing scripts, designing 2 versions of wireframes and individually creating the pattern library in Sketch.

End-to-end Design Story

Understanding Dost Education’s need

Who is Dost Education?

Our client, Dost Education is a friend to help parents in India promote early learning experiences at home. Most of the parents only speak Hindi or local dialogue, hence cannot write in Hindi nor English. Currently Dost provides 20-week curriculum to parents through delivering a 1-minute phone casts daily, 4 days per week.

Dost Education’s next year goal is digitizing current service to reduce cost and distribute contents to larger audience.

How can we help?

Our project was launched to address this key needs of our client. Initial touchpoint with Dost helped our team further defined our project goal defined below. We learned that the smartphone users in India is rapidly growing due to cheaper internet service and smartphones. Thus it would be a next step to start transitioning the current phone casts service to a mobile web App that will also provides space for service expansion.

Project Goal: Design a Mobile web product for Dost’s content library to compliment their phone cast service & better serve the 30% (~15k) users with smartphones.

The Definition Phase — Design the right thing

Knowing where we are going does not clarify how we can get there. We wanted to make sure we were designing the right thing for the target users. The end users of our design were semi-literate parents with pre-school kids in India. I found myself asking, what are these parents like? Do they have similar online behaviors comparing to users in the U.S.? What are their thoughts on the current service?

We answered these questions through various user research methods, including literature reviews, user surveys and stakeholder interviews. These methods helped us empathize with our users and establish design principles that guided the execution phase.

challenges of accessing end users

Since Dost Education is located in India, our team faced significant challenges in accessing the end users—parents who would be using our design. These challenges included:

Communication barriers: Working remotely and dealing with time zone differences made it nearly impossible to reach these parents.
Culture barriers: Most end users do not speak English, and our limited understanding of their languages and cultural background made it difficult to conduct interviews with them.

Solution: Incorporating clients in the user research process

In the face of culture barriers, I educated myself briefly by researching existing papers on accessibility design and Indian users’ online behaviors. In terms of communication difficulties, after communication with Dost, we agreed on drafting a short survey, which would be translated and distributed to users through Dost team. Survey was selected as the method since it is standardized, easy to administer by field agents and disturb users less. The final short survey consisted of 2 parts: questions about user’s interaction with Dost phone cast service and user’s smartphone interaction habits.

Research Insights

Luckily, despite of the messy translation back and forth and minor misunderstanding of wordings, both approach provided us fruitful insights. One key takeaway from the online research suggested that illiterate population perceive photo-realism visual cues better than abstract icons. In addition, through the survey we were able to extract 3 major pain points of parents we aimed to address with our design.

Know the Users

We were also able to sketch out a more holistic picture of our users based on the research result, including their demographics, detailed information of their literacy-level. Most importantly, we learned more about our users’ familiarity with existing Apps and smartphone services: Most of them acquired Android phones, rarely download Apps and were familiar with communicating with WhatsApp and watching videos on Youtube.

Design Principles

With all the user research, literature reviews and communications, we defined the concrete design principles moving into the design execution phase:

We aimed to design for information accessibility to help users grasp the right contents at the right time; we aimed to design for engagement to address the needs of users to incorporate their children and stick to the routine; we aimed to design for personalization to better adjust to individual differences.

Design for Information Accessibility
Design for Engagement
Design for Personalization

The end deliverable we provided for our client at this stage was the Design Brief, which highlight major goals, insights and design principles briefly, keeping our clients informed of our progress and where we were heading.

The Execution Phase — Design the thing right

“steal like an artist“

We started the ideation phase through seeking inspiration from kids App and other accessibility Apps designed for people with disability. Our goal was to learn how other designers assisted populations that cannot read or with low technical-literacy to solve interaction problems.

Some ideas we decided to steal:

Design audio guide that read titles out loud
Content progressive disclosure — Enable Curriculum Locking and Unlocking feature
Utilize clear visual cues to direct users, such as realistic & clickable video cover, bold icons for primary CTAs

Prototyping Round 1 — Audio Assistant A/B versions

Remote Testing: Empowered by Collaboration

We had two versions of wireframes designed, InVision click-through prototypes prepared, and user-testing metrics in place. The challenge now was determining the best way to remotely test the concept-level audio assistant in the field.

With the support of our enthusiastic developers and engaged clients, we devised a plan to conduct remote user testing. We decided to empower our client to run the user testing sessions themselves, providing them with detailed video recordings and comprehensive user testing question scripts. This approach allowed us to gather valuable feedback directly from the field while overcoming the challenges of remote collaboration.