Students

11.000

40.000

Teachers and  Leaders

What is Alef Education?

Alef Education is a global leader in education technology, at the forefront of using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create personalized learning experiences that transform how the world is educated. Being an award-winning digital and learning platform Alef provides personalized education to support students’ learning. While working on this project, we successfully redesigned the main product — the Alef Platform — and launched it in Indonesia, increasing the student base to up to 1 million students.

Project Duration

December 2020 -
January 2022

Responsibilities

As the Senior UX Designer, I spearheaded the product design and user research for Alef's flagship product — the Student Platform. My responsibilities included revamping the existing solution, leading research initiatives, and integrating innovative features. Throughout this process, I worked in close collaboration with the Product Manager, UX researchers, a UI designer, and the development team."

Role

Senior UX Designer

Problem Statement

1. Outdated Design. The existing student journey design is outdated and fails to address the diverse needs of a modern student demographic.

2. Lack of Mobile-Friendly Platform. With the increasing number of students and new market expansions, we need to make the platform mobile-friendly to ensure a seamless learning experience on smartphones and tablets, which are essential for our users.

1. Redesign the Student Journey. To revamp the student journey design to be more aligned with the current and diverse needs of modern students, ensuring it is intuitive, accessible, and engaging for our user base.

2. Cross-Device Platform Optimization. Optimize the scalability of Alef Education's platform for seamless learning across diverse devices and global audiences.

Phase 1. Empathize with users

User Research

We began our user research with an internal kick-off workshop involving our stakeholders. Following this, we embarked on a comprehensive analysis of the current information and data, which included analytics tools like Smartlook.com and heatmaps, and proceeded with a UX audit. We then ran a series of usability tests with our students, conducted interviews with teachers, and meticulously reviewed all support requests from our school leaders. In the final phase, we organized and categorized the insights we collected, aligning them with the problems we had identified.

Research Methods

Research Goals

• Gather qualitative insights into Alef Education users, their behaviors, needs, and challenges.
  

• Systemize user knowledge to inform product decisions effectively.

• Identify and categorize user problems to prioritize improvements.

• Evaluate product usage and pinpoint usability issues for enhancement.
  

User Interviews

The most insightful phase of our research involved user observations and customer interviews. Through user observations, we gained a deep understanding of how our students and teachers interacted with the Alef platform, identified challenges they encountered, and noted the obstacles they faced. Subsequently, during customer interviews with 14 participants, we collected valuable feedback that enabled us to categorize and prioritize the identified user problems.

User research: pain points

"Sometimes, I don't know where to click or what to do next in the app. It's confusing"

"When I get the answers wrong, it doesn't tell me why, so I keep making the same mistakes."

"The app takes a long time to start, and sometimes it just stops working in the middle of my lesson"

"I can't use the tool very well because the text is too small and it doesn't read to me"

Personas & Customer Journey Maps

We took a closer look at the data gathered in the previous phase, particularly the User Interviews. By synthesizing our customer research and tagging our most important insights—primarily the problems—we crafted user stories and defined two key personas. For each persona, we designed detailed user journey maps. 

Workshop with our stakeholders

We organized a workshop that brought together moderated, mixed groups of various stakeholders, using MIRO as our collaborative platform. During this session, we dedicated our efforts to developing customer profiles — the first segment of the Value Proposition Canvas — and crafting a compelling value proposition. This cross-functional collaboration from the early stages of the design process ensures that all teams contribute to a unified strategy, simplifying the process of explaining and adopting design solutions as the project advances.

Phase 3. Prototype 

Information Architecture

At the next step, we outlined user flows, created storyboards, and started working on the new information architecture of our platform. Information architecture (IA) provides product development and engineering teams with a bird’s-eye view of the entire product. Having a single document that delivers a simple and understandable representation of how the website works is vital for developing new features, updating existing ones, and for seeing what is possible considering the existing product.

After creating the IA, we developed a list of design principles that we wanted to support, based on the main research findings and key customer insights. Then we proceed working on the first version of wireframes and built low-fidelity prototypes.

Usability study: findings

After creating a prototype from the low-fidelity wireframes, we conducted a remote moderated usability study for Alef. We invited 16 participants to navigate through various scenarios in our prototype and complete three prompts. Subsequently, we employed affinity diagramming to collate observations from the usability study and synthesized the data. Using Miro boards, we organized the findings into clusters, identifying themes and patterns. We received sufficient feedback to inform our future design iterations.

Accessibility considerations

The outcomes and results