Designing a home exercise App for primary school students & teachers.
- Client work
- Agency: Electric Studio
- Year: 2019
- Duration: 3 Months
- My Role: User Research, User Flows, Wire framing, UI/UX Design, Prototyping, User Testing, Brand Identity
Context
Sports Cloud offered a library of short, digestible instructional videos designed to help schools and families make good fun exercise a daily habit.
The Challenge
Schools in the UK are facing staffing shortages, with teachers often required to take on additional roles to fill gaps in education provision. Sports Cloud aimed to assist by supporting teachers that had to step-up and take on a role outside their comfort zone by offering a range of resources for use inside & outside the classroom.
The main research goal was to:
- Teachers: Understand how teachers are currently structuring their PE lessons, what resources they are using, any restrictions they had in their current methodology.
- Head teacher: Understand how the school approaches PE as a whole in the school, how they are integrating their PE lessons to meet the curriculum and what the current school to home learning link is to PE.
- Parents: Understand how they would use this product, if they would find it useful, if there are any current home to school links, whether or not parents want to be active or passive users.
Designing the Solution
Research & Planning
Now that we had a relatively detailed brief, I would go onto produce two short questionnaires for both teachers & parents. The former I conducted over a number of telephone calls with pre-arranged participating schools in Oxfordshire, the latter would created as an online survey in the interests of anonymity & safeguarding.
Analyising the Data
One recurring theme when interviewing Teachers was that they universally wanted some flexibility & control over the lesson content and length. This ran counter to the original vision of the product, where the owners would produce and curate well considered lesson plans.
This would still be the focus, however we also prototyped multiple solutions to give teachers a sense of agency in creating their lessons; from a ticketing request system to playlists, which is what we decided to include in the MVP and test.
A drag and drop interface was designed to allow teachers the ability to quickly and intuitively re-order or edit lessons, or build entirely new ones. Each exercise video had a suitability associated with it for its place in the lesson, as well as a duration to help the teacher create a lesson that fits their needs and while not becoming a burden on their schedule.
User Flows
To address Sports Cloud’s business goals and to maximise engagement with students, user flows were created and tailored to each user archetype.
On reflection the user flow here needn’t have encompassed all user types & would have been more digestible creating separate flows for each group, my thinking at the time was to show the relationship between the types of users and at what point their needs intersect.
UI Design
Responsive & Mobile
The Sports Cloud web application needed to work for all occasions, which meant that Lessons needed to be accessible on any device or screen resolution for students to use at home & teachers in the classroom or to follow along on a mobile device.
Lesson building & Reporting for Teachers
Teachers needed a clear visual representation of how many students were engaging with the challenges, marketing those that excelled and those that needed a bit more encouragement.
Dashboard – Pupil, Homework
To improve user acceptance, the UI was designed to be able to be adjusted to match the school’s branding via admin settings. The current week’s challenge, along with the pupil’s progress (and later awards) throughout the year would need to be at the forefront.
Gamefication
Badges were pitched as a concept to help students keep motivated and mark milestones, cultivating a sense of excitement in unlocking new challenges (and promoting a little healthy competition with their peers!).
These would have been activity focussed, being awarded for participation in lessons & extra curricular activities.
Reflections
Launching as an MVP showed promising initial adoption for Sports Cloud. Unfortunately, the project faced unexpected challenges, primarily due to the nationwide lockdown imposed in the UK during the spring of 2020, shortly after its initial autumn 2019 launch. This unforeseen circumstance led to a pause in the project’s progression, causing it to remain in the Alpha phase.
In retrospect, there was an opportunity to launch a marketing campaign, pivoting the focus on the value of Sports Cloud in facilitating home learning by offering free access to resources during the extended lockdowns. This unexpected, prolonged “trial period” could have been viewed as an opportunity to build trust and cultivate loyalty among users.
Looking back, it’s clear that circumstances presented both challenges and opportunities for Sports Cloud. It’s very unfortunate that the product was sunset before we could make real, positive change in young people’s lives.