SEVEN UP
A redesign of online self study challenge.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Why do people drop out of online self-study challenges?
It is quite common for people nowadays to own multiple careers. The phenomenon gives birth to lots of self-study services such as online self-study challenge, for example, Daily UI and VoiceTube. Online self-study systems provide users with not only learning resources but also the chance to practice and get advice by uploading their works of daily challenges to the public community and thus became very popular. However, during the observation, we found out that in numerous users(including ourselves) who have tried the self-study challenges, only a small minority of people complete the challenge or keep it as a habit.
Photo credit: https://goo.gl/nmkUbT
Take Daily UI( a 100 day UI design challenge) as an example. It can be seen that the number of works declined sharply in day 20 and even went below 20% of the original amount in day 40.
RESEARCH
The structure of existing self-study challenges
To figure out this phenomenon, we analyze the structure of existing online self-study challenges and use the Fogg Behavior Model and The Hook Canvas Model (both are often used in cases related to cultivating habits) to analysis the users' behaviors, trying to find the reason why people ended up dropping out.
Fogg Behavior Model
In Fogg behavior model, behavior is composed of "motivation", "ability" and "trigger". In this case, the self-study challenge itself serves as a big trigger and normally, people who choose to start self-study challenges often have a higher motivation for learning. If we assumed that the participants' abilities will grow gradually during the journey to complete different tasks, it seems to be no big deals for users to cross the action line. Under the premise, the most possible reason why users dropped out of the challenge may be " losing motivation during the time".
Hook Model
We then took a closer look with Hook Model to do the further search of the cause of decrease of users' motivation and found out that there are defects in the existing self-study challenge systems that probably make some users drop out.
INSIGHTs
Photo credit: voicetube.com
Lack of External Reward:
frustrated for not getting social rewards for uploading works
In online self-study platforms that let users upload their daily works, there has been a disparity between the social attention that different users get(as the reward of uploading homework). For example, some popular users who've been engaged in the platform for a while often get many likes and comments under their post while some people don't get any. This may result in a frustrating experience for those who spent lots of efforts but didn't get enough social reward and thus lower the internal motivation of continuing self-study.
Internal Trigger Gets Lower:
Difficult to get professional evaluations of users' enhancement in skills
Lack of professional evaluation of users' improvement in skills. In most of the self-study
challenges, users get attention and feedback from each other which is sometimes difficult for participants to get constructive opinions from the platform to see the growth of their own abilities. For example, the number of likes or the content of the comments does not have a direct correlation to one's professional level. Thus, for not seeing concrete and objective enhancement in skills, some users ended up dropping out of the challenge.
SOLUTION
Gamification
Enhance external trigger. Provide users with goals and rewards through gamification.
Daily Fellow
Provide social rewards for every participant. Make friends and let efforts be seen!
Invite Experts As Tutors
Invite experts as tutors and evaluators in the system. Get professional evaluations of skills by practicing them with experts in the specific field.
Designed by: Chien Chih Hsu, Hou-Jen Chen, Hsuan-Tzu Shen
Responsible for: problem clarify, ideation, visual design