Classroom
Company: Udacity
Role: Product Designer
Timeline: Jul 2019 - Sep 2019
Desktop Web App
Background
Udacity is an online education company that creates Nanodegree programs — certifications in niche and emerging technologies. Students that enroll in a program, take their course through the online classroom and are taught by leaders in the tech industry. In 2019, a new mentorship service was launched. Once a student enrolls in a course, they are automatically matched to a mentor during their onboarding, based on their education or career goals and time zone.
Problem
We found that only ~20% of students engaged with this new service, meaning that they sent more than five messages per month to their mentor. At the time, the only place of communication for students and mentors was through Student Hub, the Udacity community chatroom.
This led to our first hypothesis that additional mentor exposure in the online classroom would increase engagement. Our second hypothesis was that students who interact more with their mentor are more likely to complete their Nanodegree program.
“I usually get the most messages the days leading up to a project being due. The number of messages also start to decrease the further along students get into their Nanodegree, assuming because the projects get harder and students lose motivation.”
Udacity Mentor
Goal
Enhance the learning experience through fostering a stronger student-mentor connection.
Research
A lot of research was done in order to get a better understanding of the student-mentor relationship. I worked with the user researcher to create a questionnaire of in-depth questions asking mentors and students to explain their experience with mentorship so far.
The main takeaway was that students were frustrated when they didn't know their mentor was online and therefore often missed a crucial time period where they would be able to get real-time help on their project.
Discovery
To get a better sense of the student-mentor relationship, I created a flow of possible engagement touch points.
Welcome flow
The first point of contact for the student-mentor relationship happens during the welcome flow. The system sends an automated message from their mentor welcoming them to the program.
Proactive mentor
Another reason for contact is when the mentor wants to check in on the student unprompted. Many mentors like to be proactive in building their relationship with the student.
Student outreach
The most common point of contact is when the student reaches out to their mentor when they are stuck on a problem or project. This is where students experience the most frustration.
Brainstorm
The team and I began by discussing ideas that we brainstormed during our kickoff meeting. A lot of great ideas were generated and in order to prioritize, we created an impact chart to see which ideas to work through first. From this exercise, we decided to pursue notifications in the classroom first.
User testing
Working with the user researcher, we were able to do usability testing on a few students to get their insights on this new feature. In addition to mocking up the feature on project pages, I wanted to show students this feature in different contexts, such as when viewing video content, to get their thoughts if it would be too intrusive to their learning.
Classroom
Message preview
From UXR, we learned that students really liked this feature in which they would be able to view a preview of messages from their mentor. This gave them insight into whether or not they should open up Student Hub, the online chatroom.
Notifications
One concern about push notifications in the classroom was that it would be too intrusive to the students learning. However, we found that students actually liked seeing this because it gave them real-time updates that their mentor was online — something they felt was extremely important for them to know.
Measuring success
In order to measure success of this feature, we wanted to see if there was an increase in mentorship engagement, aiming for ~50% of students to send more than five messages a month to their mentor. A longer term goal is seeing if there is a correlation between graduation rates and mentor engagement.