Empowering the youth through education and community.

YMCA Life Skills Portal

So, what's the problem?

Ever feel like you weren’t taught enough about credit scores, taxes, and all the super exciting stuff that comes with becoming an adult? The YMCA wants to create an accessible and friendly portal to engage and empower young adults in learning relevant life skills. 

Our task was to conduct the proper research and complete a concept project, to design an app that will be a friendly & stimulating learning environment to enrich young adults in practical life skills.

 
 

Are there other ways to learn?

 

Our team looked for competitors and concluded that there was a serious lack of options for this specific task. We sourced apps that were created to promote teaching a new thing, including an industry favorite like Duolingo. Others included LevelUp, Winked & the closest competitor, Real Word. 

Key Insights: 

  1. The apps that did exist in this space were not updated and had little interaction with learning a new topic.

  2. None of the apps included in-person learning environments, something we knew we wanted to include with the YMCA. 

  3. Gamification was a huge trend to keep users feeling rewarded for completing a lesson. 

R E S E A R C H

Let’s ask the users, shall we?

When beginning our research, we wanted to be sure to listen to what the users needed from this new portal. We conducted 7 initial user interviews and 2 surveys. We asked users about which topics they wished they had learned about earlier, and how they navigated learning about those skills on their own when the time came to apply them.

Key Survey Insights

Snippet of Affinity Map

Key Affinity Map Insights:

  1. Users typically learned practical life skills through family & friends, and were not ever taught about these skills in grade school or college.

  2. Users frequently learned on the spot when the time came to apply them.

  3. Users like to be walked through the process, instead of being given the bulk of the info at once (which is why companies like TurboTax & Credit Karma were popular among them). 

  4. Users rely on Google for answers because they feel like they have no other place to learn. 

  5. Users find learning these skills on their own is frustrating and uninviting.

 Persona: Meet Billie! The Curious Student…

20 years old

Student at East Los Angeles College

Billie quickly realizes they know little-to-nothing about practical life skills (such as taxes, credit scores etc.), and they're looking for a stimulating way to learn them, especially before they move out and need to apply them in their life.

Needs & Goals:

  • Wants to learn realistic skills such as: taxes, credit, investment, physical & emotional health

  • Needs a way to learn important life skills in a stimulating way

  • Wants to be able to master these skills before they have to apply them in real life

Behaviors:

  • Frequently asks family or Google for answers to any questions

  • Likes to be walked through the process step-by-step

  • Is more of a visual learner

  • Has often learned things on the spot

Frustrations:

  • Frustrated that practical life skills were not taught in high school or college

  • Thinks learning about taxes, insurance, etc. is boring 

  • Feels like they still have a lot to learn about being an adult

 How might we…

Create an exciting way to learn about otherwise boring important life skills?

Help Billie to master these important life skills so that they are prepared for when they arise in real-life situations?

Understand which skills should be prioritized when creating a learning environment for young adults?

 

“Billie needs a stimulating and enjoyable way to learn about practical life skills so that they are prepared to apply them in the future when they are needed."

I D E A T E  &  B R A I N S T O R M

Keeping empathy at the forefront…

We started to think about what we wanted to include in the portal...what we knew was we needed to make learning these life skills:

  • Stimulating 

  • Engaging  

  • Make the users feel supported and connected. 

Our team started with design studios, each sketching our ideas of what the app should look like, and presenting them to each other. We prioritized features and created a plan of action. Making sure the app had both in-person lessons as well as in-app modules was extremely important. As well as a way to connect them through a discussion board. Our main constraint: time.

Usability Testing: Round 1

How easy, satisfying and engaging is the experience is for a first-time user? Is the navigation intuitive? Are key features discoverable? Our tasks included creating an account, signing up for a live class, and beginning an in-app module.

Key Insights:

  • While all users ultimately completed all tasks, 1/2 of our users ended up frustrated on the search page trying to find a self-paced, in-app lesson.

  • A big factor of confusion was the terminology: our use of the phrase "My journeys" to describe the user's selected topic & specific lessons inside the app was described as "confusing" and occasionally "intriguing." Users need straightforward language - the app should drop the non-intuitive term "journey" so users can think less

  • Created full size Google & Facebook buttons to adhere to convention

  •  Moved ‘next’ buttons up for greater proximity

  • ‘Skip this step’ as bottom navigation for minimalist feel

  • Changed “my journeys” to self paced lessons

  • Added reference to "Vocab," a glossary feature

  • Put titles under icons

  • Created a toggle at the top of search page to switch between "Live classes" & "Self Paced Lessons"

 

 Usability Testing: Round 2

Our design changes were validated with overall improvement of navigation and ease of use. In fact, more than half of our users engaged with that new toggle on the search page. Though we did find that language clarity issues persisted, to a lesser degree. Users still seemed confused about the terminology of “Self-paced Lessons”.

 

 So what’s next?

We know from our usability tests that there's room for improvement to foster a friction-free experience. With more time, we'll engage in word-smithing to provide more clarity and adjust some flows to adhere more closely to user expectations. We'd expand continuity of interactions for exploration with easy-tap buttons. Due to the nature of a two-week sprint, there were many design paths left unexplored.

  • Adding value by recommending specific products or services.

  • Make it social with a "buddy" system, friendly competition, or by simply making it easy for users to share their wins.

  • Enhance the gamification aspect throughout the app.

  • Language changes - we'd investigate how to distinguish the in-app content from the classes you offer at your branches.

  • There are opportunities to shorten the time users spend trying to get to a lesson, by reducing the number of frames they navigate through.

Finally, we have some major considerations regarding accessibility. In a full build of this app, we'd need to invest in multiple languages to reach users across L.A., and solve for some content-density issues like text size and more.