Codaflix is an e-learning application that helps to introduce and teach tech skills like coding to kids. The app is meant to introduce kids to core concepts of technology while making it fun and interesting for them.
"Your kids can become the next youngest tech CEO if they start early".
The client, 9jacodekids is a leading tech school that teaches coding to kids and teens in Nigeria and they sought to build an online learning application for their students and reach a wider audience. My goal was to work with the team to create a mobile product for kids to learn tech skills like coding being taught by the school.
9jacodekids have previously relied on traditional physical classes to teach coding to their students however, with the effects of COVID the company had to adapt. During those times, there were no physical meetings and everything had to be online.
The school needed a platform to continue providing education to their students and considered various options. The school used a variety of services like zoom, meet to conduct online live classes but none were completely convenient hence the need to build their own.
The CEO decided to work with this option because it would give complete freedom on how the courses are being taught and introduce creative ways to engage the kids. A mobile application would not only advertise the company but it would also help generate revenue.
Numerous studies show that children can be introduced to core concepts of programming as early as 7 years, and while this is possible, its worth noting that for kids learn better by doing fun stuff like games hence most programming apps for kids are gamified.
Designing for kids differs from designing from adults because their cognitive reasoning is different from adults and so many factors must be taken into consideration to design and build an application intended for them. Quality and intensive early childhood education positively affects a child by creating an early interest to learn and explore programming.
We created a list of "How Might We" questions to help us align our user tasks and goals:
I interviewed some of the school students aiming to gain valuable insights. We approached the interviews by asking these students about how they feel about online learning. Curious as to the efficiency of online learning, our main aim was to understand what their motivations, triggers and abilities were. From this, we hoped to gain insight into their basic decision-making process.
Brainstorming on elements of a successful kids learning application, we asked the following:
What makes online learning online easy? What activities are students interested in? How can we pull this off in our app? What are some other needs, interests and issues that can arise when kids learn online?
The interviews helped to get leads on other competitive apps that these students were either currently using, or had previously tried before. We discovered apps like Kodable, Lightbot, Diasy the Dinosaur and Scratch jnr.
Synthesizing the data from the interviews enabled us identify the following user behavior patterns:
From the data I collected, I created an ideal user flow as how I imagined the app to pan out and what the desired user experience would entail. It later developed into an journey map, which captured the user’s journey and emotional results with each touchpoint they perform within the app.
From here I could decide what actions and features were crucial and beneficial, and designed a sitemap around these conclusions. We wanted to create a seamless experience for the target users by emphasizing on simplicity but keeping a balance between the pre recorded classes versus assessments of the students as both were appreciated.
Low fidelity wireframes helped us to create the skeleton of how we wanted our app to look like.
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I designed high fidelity mockups of the application
Initially the goal of the application was to create an application for the school to teach their students. The school creates programming lessons as videos for their students and the idea at the time was to build a platform where the school will host their pre-recorded classes for students to learn but our research revealed that students may not properly grasp core concepts and we needed to iterate.
After user-testing the app with a handful of students, it was apparent that the purpose of the app was shortsighted as kids cannot effectively learn this way. A few suggestions were made and we knew we had to iterate. Some include:
I redesigned the flow with this change in mind to make sure online classes were a lot more fun for the users. I pulled user interface inspiration from popular kids learning apps to study how they guide users through complicated journeys.
There is still a lot more to explore with Codaflix and were iterating. What if activities were introduced through the partnership of businesses and events? What if routes were generated by users and crowdsourcing? Can we use other ways to share and review routes? These are just some of the questions I'd like to expand on as I continue to work on this project. But for now, feel free to check out the current state of the app by clicking 'Explore the App' below.