Nuclear Education HUB
After working for several years with the European Nuclear Education Network(ENEN), creating courses and projects for universities, managing applications, it became very clear that there is a clear gap between the teachers initiating the courses/trainings/workshops and the students for whom they were created. There was a one way approach, with little to no interest in the students behaviour, wants and needs.
Our primary goal was to provide an engaging and user-friendly experience that motivates and supports teachers and students alike to engage in acadamic growth.
With the help of my colegue Octavian, I set out on a quest to discover a digital solution that is simple, easy to comprehend, yet interactive and useful, aiming to promote academic growth. We collaborated through the research and exploration phase, where we came together to explore and analize insights, findings and opportunities.
Connecting teachers with students
We began by understanding the target audience of the platform, such as students, professionals, and institutions involved in nuclear education and training. We wanted to reach a broader audience and quantify findings, so a survey was the first step in the research journey.
We asked students about their learning goals, preferred learning methods, and challenges they faced when looking for educational training and vocational training.
We asked teachers how they promote courses, their needs in managing listings, and any challenges they face with content presentation.
Our research revealed:
64% of students indicated that they preferred a blended learning approach, combining both online and face-to-face methods, due to the flexibility and interaction it offers. Additionally, 53% of students cited "difficulty in finding relevant courses" as their primary challenge when seeking educational and vocational training opportunities.
Our research revealed:
72% of teachers reported that "effective course promotion and visibility" was a major challenge in ensuring their programs reached the intended audience. Furthermore, 58% of teachers highlighted "content management issues" as a barrier, particularly in managing their students applications and accessing performance reports for their courses.
Starting from a very positive premise, we outlined our research goal:
“Explore the experiences of students and teachers with nuclear education and identify solutions that could support them in better connecting the needs of each to the others offerings.
What are the most frequent and significant challenges or obstacles encountered by users interested in nuclear education, be it from the students point of view(such as having to look in multiple places for different courses, not having clear filtering options, not having enough information about courses, etc.) or the teachers(such as not being able to bring their courses in front of a wide audience, not being able to tranc performance of courses, etc.)?
Additionally, what would motivate each of them to use a nuclear education platform?”
While using the above to shape our initial survey questions brought great results from students, we found that it didn't work so well with teachers., mainly due to their limited availability. Recognizing the need for deeper insights from teachers before moving on to the generative phase, we sought alternative methods. ENEN (European Nuclear Education Network) provided an opportunity by facilitating our presence at their annual conference.
This allowed us to conduct in-depth interviews with over 20 educators from leading global universities in the nuclear field, ensuring the crucial feedback necessary for our research.
As we were looking at a lot of unstructured and complex data, we had to organize data into clusters, get deeper insights, identify patterns.
Armed with a lot of organized data, insights, connections, we rolled-up our creative sleeves and started to generate a wide range of ideas to address user needs, solve problems, and create innovative solutions, which led to multiple opportunities.
How does the competition do it?
Further competitive analysis was done to better understand key strenghts, weaknesses, user experience and to identify opportunities for improvement and differentiation.
I reviewed competitors platforms/app, looking at swap process, user onboarding, point system/direct transactions.
Key takeaways
A deep dive into the sustainable fashion swap scenery led me to identify users needs for an easy and quick swap process, which promted me to choose a clear process, where the user just picks the category of the item, and the listing(images, description, categorising and pricing being done for them).
Another aspect was choosing a points system as opposed to the percentaje payout or direct transaction the competition offers. Users getting points encourages swapping and upholds the whole sustainability purpose of the app. Earned points are based on what the appraised value is and not what others want to pay for it. The major advantage of the points system being that the user is enabled to choose what they want to shop for and are not constrained by the availability or others to switch their item in direct swapping.
It's time to get visually creative
The app design started with building the user flow which had 3 main branches: onboarding users, upload swap and purchase swap.
I took the flows and built them into an initial design exploration for the app.
Simplifying innovation to ensure intuitive flows
With our target users being somewhat accustomed with the e-commerce aspect of the app I wanted to make sure that the innovative swap flow was easy to understand and use. With the app all prepped up, prototyoped and ready to be experienced, I did two rounds of usability testing. While the idea was very well received and praised, it was apparent that:
1. Two of the main flows of the app, namely the upload swap and purchase swap was not intuitive and easy to use.
2. Some users struggle with understanding the process of uploading swaps and getting points
Upload Swap flow 1
Upload Swap flow 2
Purchase Swap flow 1
Purchase Swap flow 2
How it works
Explore the latest prototype below: