People who wish to pick up a new skill don’t have the time and money to dedicate to learn; people who identify themselves experts in certain areas don’t have the chance to teach and share.
A platform that enables users to conveniently learn skills or teach others through the unique system of exchanging “time”, as well as encouraging users to step out to communicate with others.
The project lead, UX design, UI design, Experience mapping, Research
Team members: Zhuorong Yuan, Jiajin Lan, Noel Gonzalez, Shibo Li.
To learn more about the current situation in the related field, we conducted a competitive analysis to see the strength and weaknesses of some competitors. By doing this, we gained a first overview of how our design direction might be.
We have conducted interviews with 14 participants including the introvert and extrovert, to find out what is needed for them to interact with people who they are not familiar with, and what makes them step out of their comfort zone.
We sent out surveys both online and on ground, and we received 151 responses. After affinitizing and analyzing the data, we gained some main findings including:
After gathering the data from the research, we analyzed the data and created three personas as our target user groups. By doing this, we gained a deeper understanding of our users' pains and goals, which guided the following analysis of the user's experience.
Time and money, where the most dominant variers to engaging in the process of learning a new skill, even though the majority of people surveyed had a clear focus on the area they wished to participate in.
We challenged ourselves to look at these variers in a different lens, one where money and time became the asset and not the aspect of life that held users back.
We turned time into the currency that would enable users to participate in Xpand. Participants would trade their time in exchange for engaging in a learning experience. While the contributors would gain time tokens allowing them to engage in other learning opportunities or trade them in for money.
The storyboard illustrates the conceptual journey that one may have through using our product.
The experience map shows the possible doing, thinking, and feeling of the user in different stages of using our product, to understand better about the user's behaviors.
We recruited 5 participants to test our prototype. To better illustrate the flow, we chose to use paper prototypes to run the tests. We gathered some feedback and iterated our prototype.
