Droning On About Learning: A UX Case Study for SkyTech's Engaging Educational App

Overview

I designed SkyTech; an educational app for the new generation of students(Gen Z) in Sweden; as a part of my UX design course at Jonkoping university. This app uses drones to teach students different topics such as historical monuments, nature and agriculture in a more engaging way than traditional methods of learning and provides this digital native generation a more enjoyable educational experience.

Why Traditional Teaching Methods Fail Gen Z?

Gen Z have some unique characteristics. They've grown up with the new technology and gadgets and have a short attention span unlike the previous generations. They often complain about the lack of interaction between themselves and teachers and also outdated and boring methods of teaching at school. In fact, a study conducted by the LEGO Education Foundation in 2022, found that 80% of parents believe their children either dislike or are bored at school. All of these points made us to think about an innovative solution to help this generation.

The Future of Education is Here: SkyTech's Drones Make Learning Efficient and Fun

Forget boring textbooks! SkyTech's drone app is like having your own personal tour guide for any subject. Want to see the pyramids up close for history class? Done! Studying ecosystems? Fly a drone through a rainforest without leaving your seat.  SkyTech makes learning feel like an adventure, letting you explore the world (and beyond!) in a way that's totally Gen Z approved.  It's like learning by doing, but way cooler (and with way less homework).

Let's get to know better our target audience

So, to collect some valuable data from Gen Z students and develop our idea based on those data, I decided to do a contextual inquiry research on our potential users to have an interview with them and also observe their interaction with technology.

What did they say?

I conducted some interviews with 8 students from Jönköping university and after analyzing their answers, I extracted some insights that were really helpful to us:

What did they do?

To validate the initial assumptions, after interviews, I asked those 8 students to install and work with a drone simulator app on their cell phone to see if they can easily deal with such app or not. This was the app that installed and used by students:

After working with this app for a while, based on my observations and asking some follow-up questions from students, I found out these points:

• Students loved working with the app and were impressed by its visual design.

• They didn't get bored after using this app for a while.

• Only 2 students felt uncomfortable at the beginning of working with app due to the poor navigation

• Almost all of them couldn't remember correctly the details about the places that they saw on the app as they were overwhelmed with controlling the drone and missed out the details of objects and places.

Who are we designing for?

After analyzing the interviews and observations, I identified some commonalities in our target audience. So, I created 2 main user personas for this app to empathize with users and design more efficiently for our target audience.

What will the user journey look like in our app?

SkyTech takes users on an interactive learning journey! Choose a topic (history, nature, agriculture) and explore live drone footage. Informative alerts highlight key locations, offering detailed info and engaging videos. Test your knowledge with quick quizzes after each stop.  Ready, set, explore!

Let's design!

During the ideation process for wireframes, I tried to come up with design ideas that could create expected experience for our Gen Z users. Therefore, I created these wireframes simulate the main journey of the app.

High-fidelity design

The final high-fidelity prototype depicts the full journey of users. They choose their topic and then the adventure will begin.

Accessibility considerations

I provided transcription for each video to improve usability and accessibility of the app.

Takeaways

Impact

• My app brought more satisfaction to the new generation of students.

• Students tend to spend more time on our app learning different topics without feeling bored

• 12 out of 15 students in our class told that they would like to install and use this app

What I learned

Personally, as a millennial, I found it interesting communicating with Gen Z during the user research process. They are extremely talented and smart and designing a satisfying product for them will be an interesting challenge for me as a UX designer which can help me enhance my soft skills.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for this project was regulation since there are some limitation for using and controlling drones in some areas, particularly ancient heritages. So, maybe this app cannot be used in some particular areas and regions.

Next steps

• I want to conduct another round of usability studies to get more feedbacks from students and use them to keep working on the visual design of app.

• I also would like to consider collaborating with some schools to test our app with their students and get feedback from both students and teachers to analyze the effectiveness of our app.