afrilearn

Volunteering Opportunity

After stumbling across an opportunity to provide voluntary UX support to an educational platform, Afrilearn, I thought I'd find out more about what they do. I spoke with the co-founder, Issac, who gave me an overview of the Netflix-meets-Duolingo style platform that provides animated educational content - videos, worksheets, articles - for 6-18 year olds across Africa.

As a passionate advocate for STEM and Women in Technology, I was keen to provide value where I could if it meant contributing to providing young people with digital confidence and enjoyment in learning.

Kickstart conversation

It was really interesting to hear about the company's journey as a start-up and I felt the passion behind the mission. It seemed to already be of decent quality, but they felt it could improved further so we agreed that I'd carry out a high-level audit of the key pages and share my recommendations.

An additional ask was to review a "day" version of the newly proposed homepage, provided internally. The design was good, however, I did offer some guidance on the accessibility challenges that using the branding (bright green on white) might present to users. I felt this approach worked best than a full redesign.

Discovery - gamification

Gamification was a direction the team were very keen to explore, so after a few conversations around what works for other platforms and how Afrilearn could utilise their USP of already providing widely-used and respected educational content, I suggested getting these ideas drafted up and visualised via an ideation workshop.

The team were new to product/ux design activities and I thought this would be a fun way to move the conversation forward so I created a FigJam board and provided instructions ahead of time. As to not overwhelm, I felt it was best to start with a discovery/ideation session instead of a design sprint.

Ideation Workshop

I hosted the session on Google Meets, explained that it wasn't a test and simply a way for the team to share their ideas via sketches which we can look to action where we see fit.

The session took an hour in total and included:

• an icebreaker activity

• short discussion about objectives

• crazy 8s

• concept sketch

• dot voting

• wrap up

Despite a few technical hiccups, the session proved to be an enjoyable experience for the team and reinforced excitement to take the growing platform to new heights. An interesting theme that developed from the session was around social interaction and 'buddying up' with other users to not feel isolated, but in a way that is safe. The existence of leaderboards and light competition was seen as a potential motivator for the students to challenge themselves and feel a sense of accomplishment.

Wrapping up

The key takeaways from the session were:

• gamification was valued by all key stakeholders

• validation of these ideas was a natural next step - guerilla research, sacrificial concepts or feedback surveys