Case Study:
Skill development platform
Research, Strategy, UX, 2017-18 / Client confidential
There are myriad access gaps in school education at the bottom of the pyramid that prevent students from realising their fullest potential. We worked with an organisation that seeks to catalyse the bridging of these gaps, and in doing so help these empowered students to give back to their communities, thereby creating a self-sustaining and transformative social movement.
We designed an organisational strategy and an e-platform to help the client disseminate a research-informed non-academic program for life skills and bridging gaps in exposure.
“The hope is to create upwards social mobility in families at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, and by getting program alumnus to engage with their communities, create a ripple effect that leads to social change.”
Design Research
Our research phase included extensive comparator analysis, expert and stakeholder interviews, and several field visits. Our team included educationists, academics, researchers, designers and a tech consultant, all working closely in sync to ensure a balanced solution that address challenges at all levels of the implementation ecosystem.
We identified technology platforms that would support our stringent requirements for low-bandwidth content delivery, even across spotty networks and developed a content strategy in consultation with an educationist and a child psychologist. Our approach was to deal with all the complexity at the design level, ensuring the design solution made it easy for the client’s team to implement and maintain consistency of end-user experience of the learning material, and for users to effectively access and utilise the full range of services.
Co-learning as a guiding principle
Co-learning is big at every partner school we visited - students rely on co-curricular peer interactions to practice speaking English and other ‘soft skills’. Recognising the prevalence and popularity of the co-learning approach in the partner school system, we integrated it as a core principle in formulating our design solution.
Strategic positioning
The client needed to have their own unique presence in the educational services domain, underscored by a proprietary platform that can adapt and scale for multiple geographies in future. We identified just how wide-ranging its footprint really is, when compared to other organizations in the same service space - helping them leverage their unique presence in funding presentations.
“A unique challenge: design a digital content delivery platform for users with almost no ICT literacy.”
Proposed solution:
All project details withheld at the client’s request.
“A Silicon Valley startup type approach of centralised content creation and global distribution exclusively through a digital platform simply wasn’t going to work - we had to develop localised solutions that were sensitive to the delicate learning mechanisms of these students, for the solution to be effective at all.”