Kolawole - Product Designer

Citrone is a learning platform that makes it easy for educators to create learning experiences that engage students positively.

2021 - Present

Type - Edutech

Role - Product Designer

Platform - Web Application

Education is a very integral part of our society today and the more we evolve the more education and learning evolves, thanks to the pandemic we had a lot of people pivoting to online classes and we realized some learning institutions do not use learning platforms therefore it is impossible to track student progress, amongst other numerous things and they just prefer to go the zoom (video calls) and email routes, this is where Citrone comes in, to provide a product that cares about the students and tutors.

How do we build a user friendly product that isn’t a big incovenience from sending notes and assignments by email.
How do we track student progress on assignments, lessons, tests etc.
How do we build a product where interaction between students and tutors, students and students is very seamless.
How do we ensure transparecy on the platform i.e students are able to see the scores for their quizzes and assignments and view a breakdown of how it was graded.

I was in charge of the design direction for this product, this involved color scheme selection, logo design, UI/UX research and design. I worked hand in hand with two engineers and a product manager to ship a user centered, usable and seamless learning platform.

For this product a lot of the research we did was user interview based, why? Because like I stated earlier we were trying to build something seamless, we wanted to convince people who were used to sending mails and having long zoom calls that there were better ways so we went to learning institutions and asked tutors and students what their current pain points were and we were able to gather useful data. Here is the feedback from some of the people we spoke to :

These are Mr Johnson’s current pain points on his institutions current learning situation :

Has a hard time tracking his students progress
Wishes he could refer to old lesson notes in real time
His email is always a mess trying to sort out the numerous assignments his tutors send to him to grade.
There is a lot of room for cheating/plagiarism especially in quizzes.

These are Ms Sarah’s current pain points on his institutions current learning situation :

Doesn’t enjoy the fact that she has to be on zoom everyday, it isn’t cost effective for her.
She feels interaction can be better as a lot of people don’t like speaking on those calls.
She also doesn’t enjoy the fact that currently whatever a tutor grades her quiz/assignment is final and she can’t see a breakdown of the score.

For this process we spoke to over 50 people and they all had similar responses.

After we had gathered all the information in the research stage the next thing we did as a team was to work on the user journey that we want to give the users of the product and also work on low fidelity wireframes

Link to the User Journey

For the visual design the team worked with the Agile methodology and worked in sprints of 1 week, with each sprint we were able to design in order of importance starting from users being able to onboard to users being able to invite fellow users to join their courses till we got to the end. We opted for this methodology cause it was faster and helped us achieve more as a team

A common issue we faced in building this product was trying to convince users we could actually build something that is as seamless as what they have now and we did that by constant communication and iteration even after the user reseaarch phase, we made sure to always get feedback and this helped us to build what we have now, a big takeaway from this is to always be empathetic when you are building.

We’ve been able to launch and so far we have almost 200 users on the platform, in the 200 users we have 10 academies and we have gotten very encouraging feedback from the tutors and students in those academies, especially about being able to track student progress which was a very serious pain point in their former methods. This project made me appreciate the importance of user testing and getting the product in the hands of users during the design process.

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