MyTopDog & Vodacom e-school

My Top Dog is an education platform for after school training. Students get a chance to practise and master their skills with a recommendation engine recommending lessons to them based on their skill level in a subject.

Role: Lead product design & Design system collaborator

MyTopDog website

Dates: 2016-2017

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01 project challenge

Top Dog was under serious pressure to go live with Vodacom e-School, which was part of their corporate social responsibility projects. The go-live date was set for 4 January 2016, and the user interface just wasn’t working. We were tasked with a complete UX/UI overall of the current platform as well as a white labelled version for Vodacom…. and we had 4 months in which to do it.

02 the process

INITIAL USER RESEARCH

We visited and interviewed 12 users of the site, within their environments and established their main pain points, needs and requirements for the redesign. We also did a heuristic evaluation of the current website and presented these to the TopDog and Vodacom stakeholders.

Problems

The speed of the site was very slow.
Navigation around the site and through lessons was confusing and laborious.
Using the recommendation engine was misunderstood and was not being used effectively.

GV DESIGN SPRINT

Focus area for the sprint

What do students need in order to make their studies easier to find?
Where and how do they study?
How do we recommend lessons to them at the right time in order to upskill them?
How do we motivate them to reach their goals?

We created a prototype, tested with users and iterated on the information architecture in order to continue.

INTO AGILE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Working within a budget and a tight timeframe we continued into agile development sprints. It was very important for me to get our design team two sprints ahead of development so that we had time to design and test with users. I found my love for process within an intense environment and also found my knack for working well with developers by involving them every step of the way in our design process.

LESSONS

Design needs to be ahead of development
I learnt to manipulate agile sprints to fit into a design framework
Working with instead of against developers is key to creating something we can all be proud of.

03 outcomes

Using the school children and their parents as our focus, we created a simplified flow through the site. Users can choose to go through the linear learning route where they do one lesson after another or they can go to the new Guided learning Centre to build their skills in their weakest areas. After completing a 20 question warm up test, users will be recommended lessons focussing on their problem areas within a subject.

04 the team

6 Developers
1 UX Designer
1 UI Designer
1 Product Owner
1 QA Tester