Slang: Introducing Courses and Other UX Improvements
Product Designer
Overview
Slang offers career-specific English courses that help companies from Latin America to train their employees to speak English fluently so they can expand their business to other countries.
As part of a cross-functional team in a small start-up, I worked with a team of Engineers, a Product Manager, an Illustrator, and the CTO of the company. I was responsible for the UX and UI design as well as the visual design of the company's website and student's responsive app.
Business Goal
I joined Slang to work with the product team on upcoming features that would allow the organization to increase the number of users willing to pay for their courses.
Research
Some of the people working at Slang had degrees in Languages and Education, so as part of my job, I met with SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and the Product Manager weekly to brainstorm ideas about potential features and solutions that could help both user groups (Managers and Students).
I also conducted user interviews to understand how the solution was performing, and we collected behavioral data with heatmaps and session replays.
Identified Problems
1. Lack of Context: Managers and Students didn't know what a course entailed without asking a Sales Representative or someone from the company for these materials. Besides, students didn't have a view of their overall progress either.
2. Manual Processes: Managers couldn't review what courses we offered, and had to request collateral materials. And, each piece of collateral was manually created. The back and forth took an unnecessary amount of time and decreased engagement.
3. No Organic Lead Generation: The lack of specialized pages for each offering was compromising the SEO and was adding clutter to the design.
Success Metrics
- Reduced manual work / more distribution of collateral: measure reduction in monthly labor hours spent on creating sales collateral.
- Increase in percentage of users who are studying a professional course (as opposed to something general like Basic English).
User Flows
Since we had many different type of users and touchpoints, I started by mapping out the user flows for each user.
Wireframes
The wireframes were useful to get to an understanding of how we were imagining the structure for these pages and what kind of content we will need.
Design Iterations
Design Outcome
We also decided to add a visual redesign of the product pages and later on, the app, while we were planning the introduction of these Course pages.
After several design iterations, I came up with the designs that can still be found today in the company's website.
Learner App UX Improvements
Lookups
I also worked on the improvements of the lookups.
We noticed that the lookups didn't show enough useful information for students to learn from their mistakes or prevent them to make mistakes.
As a result, some users were using alternative apps and websites to understand the grammar, while others simply paused their practice.
I collected a bunch of references to understand how other apps were doing this.
Audio Settings
Audio settings was another part of the learner app that I worked on.
While interviewing users, many of them mentioned they had problems when trying to do listening exercises, and we realized we didn't have a way for users to troubleshoot this problem on their own.
