The Company_
Codecademy committed to building the best learning experience inside and out by taking advantage of web technology, to build the education the world needs.
An online code learning platform with a user base that is more than 45M learners.
Rescope to focus on providing the best UX to our users in the learning journey
The predefined scope was leaning toward a more personalized way to set up users' learning goals. But the inconsistent logic compares with our prior Streak experience on mobile native app added on too much complexity and that's why we decided to rescope and focus on what's the most intuitive way to introduce the feature to our users.
How can we persuade learners to come back and learn daily?
Project Goal_
Design to increase the short term learning engagement, potential long term learning habit formation, and collect user data.
Competitive Research_
Streak and goal setting are the most common approaches for habit formation in learning.
Habit formation is the core to evey types of learning.
For all the popular learning services you can see below, design the incentives to create the behaviors for habit formation is the key to successful learning.
Gamification is the most common approach for behavior change design.
The majority of the popular learning services apply gamification in their learning experience, and now this approach became pretty common in learning.
Designing for behavior change in learning.
To form the learning habit is the core for this product.
Thus, research on behavior change and apply the best practice to the design is the goal when in the ideation stage.
Streak is the best practice to motivate the users as the "reward" in the learning habit formation loop. The questions are when to introduce it and where to show the accomplishment the users achieved.
We've thought about to introduce it in the onboarding flow to the first time users, and celebrate the first win on the dashboard when the return users just come back to continue the learning. But we eventually decided to make the introduction more natural and fit into the context as I shared below.
Design_
Integrate Streak into the existing learning experience to help users to form the loop of learning behavior.
A non-interruptive approach to introduce Streak is the main focus in this user experience design, no pause for coach mark and tooltips to "showcase" this new feature, instead, we ensure it shows up at the correct time and space with the right context.
Design Focus 1_
Ensure a smooth new feature introduction to existing learning flow
a. Celebrate the first win after completing the first learning content in the flow works the best
After users complete the first learning material of the day, we celebrate the first win they've got in their daily learning with a toast.
b. Showcase the accomplishmen in the most explicit way as the encouragement ausdsia
Few other design options are not as explicit as the toast notification with the ease-in animation. The movement stimulates the excitement.
Design Focus 2_
Craft details for the best UX with minimum implementation adjustment, from visual to interaction design
a. Refine the dashboard to ensure the crucial data is easy to follow to the learners
I've tried numerous designs just to display the Streak without distracting users when they check their learning progress in the dashboard, it turns out the simplicity is the best choice
b. Optimize the notification design for the best rewarding experience with design and technical restrictions
There is an existing badge design in notification/toast that can't be changed, so I have to accommodate the old visual style when I design the Streak toast for the cases that more than one toasts show up in the same time.
Result_
Laid the foundation of learning habit formation on Codecademy learning experience.
The best result of this project was that we were able to track more user data than code submission times, and to encourage users to come back and learn daily.
The next project is another critical piece for learning habit formation as the "cue", and we were able to dive into the reason behind the learning behavior, and to help the users achieve their goal.
