APP FEATURE: LEARNING REMINDERS
February 2022
Reminder notification
Increase engagement with learning content by allowing learners to set up reminder notifications.
01 / Summary
What was delivered and how?
Team
Design Lead
PM
Tech Architect
Tech Lead
4 x engineers
What I did
Design discovery
Competitor analysis
Ideation
Story mapping
Wireframing
Prototyping
iOS and Android UI design
Copywriting
Handoff
QA
Deliverables
A fully-detailed journey map
Clickable prototype
User-interface design
Impact
The first feature built from the app vision, delivered ahead of schedule. Key result achieved 20% of users spend + 5 minutes in the app for 3+ sessions a week
02 / Planning
Following the release of the FutureLearn app beta in November 2022 the team moved on to start work towards a public release of the app in May 2022. Working with the PM and Tech Lead and referencing our vision roadmap we listed out all of the features we thought we needed to be able to ship the app. The go-live gaps were roughly sized and sequenced and learning goals and reminders was identified as a high priority.
Increasing engagement with learning content was one of the app team’s main objectives and our hypothesis was that reminder notifications would be an effective way to encourage learners to build a learning habit by regularly prompting them to learn.
03 / Design exploration
Reminder notifications are commonplace in apps and I spent some time doing desk research and competitor analysis for the feature.
I then set up and ran a design exploration workshop with the broad aim of unpacking ideas around how we might implement reminder notifications, getting an idea of what a great UX looks like and identifying any technical complexity ahead. I ran the session 3 times; once with the app team (mostly engineers), secondly with the research and design team and a third time with the Learning team who have most experience from a pedagogical perspective.
The session was run as a reverse brainstorm (remotely using Figjam). Participants were first asked to design the worst experience possible before reversing ideas to form How Might We statements and then generate ideas off these. I find that reversing the brainstorm helps participants to think from a different angle than usual and frees up thinking. We then voted on ideas and further discussed these.
Reverse brainstorm example
The workshop generated a lot of ideas and surprised the participants with the amount of complexity that it revealed. Some of the themes included:
Making it easy to discover reminders
Sell the benefits
Give full control to the user when setting up or using
Have an encouraging and motivational tone
Celebrate progress
Respect global notification settings
One of the main talking points was around the setting up of learning goals and how to define them. I came up with the following definition:
A measurable, trackable activity over a set period of time around frequency and/or duration of use that motivates the learner to engage frequently and build a learning habit.
Should be useful, easy to understand and not too easily gamed.
We had assumed it would be something like “learn 3 times a week for 30 minutes”, but we realised this would be difficult to track accurately and was somewhat meaningless. A better indicator of activity, progress and achievement would be how many learning steps marked as complete, articles read, videos watched, or quizzes and assignments completed. It was at this point that we realised that to make the setting of learning goals useful we would need to invest a lot more time as it would need to work across both app and web and we didn’t yet have a solid understanding of what would work for learners. We decided therefore to divide the work between setting a learning goal and setting a reminder notification. The latter was exclusive to the app and more of a known quantity that we could work on immediately and deliver value.
A learning reminder would simply allow someone to set up the days and time that they would like to receive a reminder notification on their phone.
Remote workshop board
04/ Story mapping
From the output of the workshop as a team we conducted a story mapping exercise to enable us to focus in on our deliverable and plan a roadmap for subsequent releases of the feature.
Story mapping
05/ Solution design
The story mapping activity allowed me break down the work into a high-level flow:
Reminder prompt
Reminder permanent home
Set up screen
Notification permission
Permission success
Permission failure
Notification
With this high-level flow I was then able to start thinking about screen design. I experimented with a few ideas around using either a single screen versus a more progressive disclosure flow breaking up each setting into a single screen. After sharing ideas with the team, our preference was to keep everything to a single screen and use modals for things like the time picker.
Designs for iOS and Android diverged quite a bit in this feature:
We used native controls for day selection and the time picker for each platform
Android does not require a user to give permission to receive notification
While doing some technical spikes for the time pickers we found that React Native did not support a modal and I needed to quickly redesign an inline version. With this sitting at the bottom of the screen we were concerned about its visibility so added in a scroll up the screen as the component is engaged with to keep it nicely positioned in the thumb zone.
For the notification itself I experimented with some different messaging tone of voice styles. We are keen to randomly vary the messaging, so that the notifications don’t start to feel stale, but for launch picked what we thought was a suitable message.
06/ QA & Accessibility
While testing the development build of the reminders set up screen I picked up some issues with accessibility. When using iOS VoiceOver I found that the roles and status for the controls was not being picked up and I had difficulty adjusting the time when the numpad is being used instead of the picker. I reported these issues to the engineers and they were able to add in the missing tags and change the focus of the screen when the picker is not being used.
07/ Outcomes
Learning reminders were released to our testing audience in February 2022. We are tracking feature adoption, set up and usage in Mixpanel and are already hitting our key result 20% of users spend + 5 minutes in the app for 3+ sessions a week
We are also planning to follow up directly with our beta testers with a questionnaire around their usage of the feature.
The learning reminders work was delivered ahead of schedule and keeping the app project on track for a public release in May 2022.
