Skillshare
Mobile app – iOS
UI, Interaction Design
Background
Skillshare is an online learning community based in the United States for people who want to learn from educational videos.
In 2017, Michael Karnjanaprakorn (the former CEO) asked me to team up with his team to design a new way for students to interact each other. Skillshare believes that learning happens best when students connect with one another to chat, ask questions, gain inside knowledge or get to know each other. They had seen discussions happen in classes and wanted to explore a different way of student interaction.
This feature was designed only for mobile as they were experimenting with it to increase mobile WAU (Weekly Active Users).
Note: This project was completed before they did a rebranding and revamp in 2020.
Concepts
In the first weeks, I looked at the various ways students could interact with other students. Here is a glimpse of the concepts.
Final concept
Throughout many concept testing, countless brainstorming sessions, and iterations, we decided to move forward with the idea of:
Making students belong to particular groups. This is similar to what has happened so far in class discussions.
Having topics for deeper and more focused discussion.
We narrowed down the feature scope to be launched for the MVP.
Thomas's craft and adaptability allowed us to test new ideas quickly and iterate towards short and long-term goals. A real pleasure working together.
Chris Boardman
Director of Mobile at Skillshare (2016-2017)
Others
Outcome
Within six weeks, I completed the concept for the MVP, and the project was successfully launched in the next couple of months. The internal team continued iterating what I had done.
Challenges
The 12-hour time zone difference was the biggest challenge, as this was my first time working with the US team. At the beginning of the project, when we needed a lot of synchronization, I had to adapt my working hours to overlap with their morning. Another challenge was the sense-making of which concept would work best for the students. As the project progressed, we got insights from the concept testing and revealed constraints, which gave us more focus to narrow down the MVP stage.