Education App

Prototyping an education app for users with low bandwidth internet

Overview

Product

I set out to design a mental health/mediation app native to the Arabic language to help users that don’t have these support resources. However, my first round of user research caused me to pivot the idea to an education app.

Context

When I started this project, I was interested in serving the mental health of users in areas of war. However, it was through speaking to these potential users, that the idea evolved. My goal was to use technology to help this user group and provide them with resources, and like any idea this evolved over time as more research informed my decision.

Goals

Research and prototype an application that provides resources to user groups suffering through war and displacement. Again, this started with mental health, but evolved to education. The goal in this process was to get to know user needs and be empathetic and responsive to them.

Methods

User research interview
Market/issue research
Usability testing
Information architecture diagramming
High fidelity prototype
Information strategy & design

Research

Method 1 - User research interview

I interviewed three fathers who are currently living in Gaza to validate the idea of the Arabic mental health and education app. Through this interview I learned about the circumstances of the users and their priorities. The users communicated that they much prefer to put any resources they have into education for their kids, as opposed to a focus on mental health. Kids in Gaza have been without schooling for over a year. Users also mentioned that:

Internet is almost non-existent - bandwidth is very limited
Electricity is not available
Devices: phones, tablets, computers are either broken or gone - some families have had to sell them to try to buy food. They are not easy to find on the market.
Sharing functions for downloaded materials are important, especially bluetooth. That way if a family has multiple devices but only one has internet to download course materials, they can share over bluetooth or share around their neighborhood.

This perspective helped inform a shift to me pivoting to create an education app for users with low bandwidth internet.

Research

Method 2 - Market/issue research

I researched available solutions for users with low bandwidth, as well as further researched the context of students in Gaza.

Low bandwidth users

Low bandwidth users often have to be careful about how much internet they are using. Not having access to fast internet is a global accessibility issue. There are some apps like the Opera browser that have options to switch to lower bandwidth uses. Other features that are recommended for low bandwidth apps are:

Offline mode
Text only design (to be lightweight). Less photos and videos.
Allowing users to download resources and store them without having to restart downloads when they are back online if they lose access in the middle of a download
Battery saving features like allowing the light/dark switch

Students in Gaza

For students in Gaza, I learned that families were unable to download textbooks and course materials from the Ministry of Education’s student portal because they did not have the bandwidth. Families were posting on Facebook asking for an alternative.

I used this as a starting point to research the flow of the the Ministry of Education’s student portal and conduct usability testing.

Research

Method 3 - Usability testing

I went through the flow of the Ministry of Education’s student portal from the perspective of a student with low internet bandwidth, working to see a path where flows could be simplify and only essential information and features were highlighted.

My observations:

Logging in could lead to a time out for users with low bandwidth because it has two separate pages, plus a captcha
Menu page once logged in is confusing - right hand menu has both an “Announcements,” “News,” and “Agenda” sections. If you didn’t already know your way around this app, you could waste bandwidth and time clicking on each of these and waiting for them to load and maybe time out.
There are also live lessons and other features that users would not be able to access anyway unfortunately that could just be left out of a low bandwidth site. It’s also not clear that someone would be able to take online tests and submit assignments easily with low bandwidth.

This helped me to realize that I’d like to focus just on helping users access course materials and download them, with a place to store them and a low bandwidth user interface.

Low fidelity prototype

I made some initial sketches based on user research notes, including a main page, course materials, and library page. The course materials page would lead to a section to download the materials based on grade level. The library page allowed users to access / store in progress downloads and share them.

Research

Method 4 - Second User Testing

I reviewed my low fidelity prototypes with two types of users - one who was a father who worked at the UN and the second was a developer who works with low bandwidth applications.

UN worker / dad

This user affirmed the usefulness of the idea for an education app with low bandwidth for users.
They requested the feature of being able to annotate / take notes on downloaded textbooks (like in Google Docs in offline mode) as a useful feature that could differentiate this platform.

Developer - low bandwidth applications

This developer affirmed the feasibility of designing / implementing an app like this
They approved of the idea of keeping bandwidth low by only allowing the users to download course materials as a start, instead of both allowing users to receive materials from the site buy also communicate back through asking questions or submitting tests

Overall the two user types helped further confirm that the prototype was on the right track.

High fidelity prototype

Final high fidelity prototypes were created that incorporated the features outlined in the user research sessions with a simple mostly text-based interface.

Information Architecture (AI) diagram

This summarizes the process I went through to create results and my insights.

Artifacts & Resources

Learning and Next Steps

I’d like to develop this into an app and have been in touch with partners to try to deploy this in through a web 3 / decentralized telecom method.

This app version focuses on just getting information to users in a low bandwidth way. In the future, I would like to focus on letting users send information back like test scores and assignments and think to solve this problem.

This will be a white label solution that can be pitched to education NGOs and others agencies