Type
App design
App design
Timeline
4 weeks
4 weeks
Role
UX & UI Designer
UX & UI Designer
Team
3 designers
3 designers
Problem
People struggle to stay motivated and manage time effectively when learning new skills. Traditional tools offer information but lack strategy, accountability, and personalization which leads to frustration and disengagement.
My role
- Led a team of 2 UX/UI designers through research, synthesis, and prototyping
- Created and refined the interview strategy after initial findings proved too broad
- Synthesized insights into actionable themes that shaped the app’s concept and user flow.
- Designed key UI elements and Jay's interactions as well as the homescreen, which served as a template for other screen designs
- Built the onboarding experience to introduce personalization early and boost engagement
- Conducted usability tests, observed engagement patterns, and flagged key UX friction for iteration
How I Thought About It
I began by exploring how people learn and what gets in their way. After an initial round of interviews, we realized answers were to broad to be actionable. I restructured our interview questions to better understand emotional and behavioural blockers for self-learning. There I uncovered the following themes:
- Lack of structure
- Low motivation
- Preference over visual learning
- Desire for personlization
To avoid falling into productivity trends I reframed the challenge as: "Could we design an app that feels like a personal coach?". One that is adaptable to the user's skill level and encouraging the whole way. To do this I focused on:
- Designing a more visually engaging system that allows for personalized learning based the abstract concept of "growing" your knowledge and skills.
- Personifying Jay through language and visual aids to make tracking in the app more like a personalized and narrative experience
- Introducing gamified elements such as progress tracking to make personal growth visible and rewarding
- Building the onboarding experience around interaction with Jay to build trust and encourage engagement from the first tap
Outcomes
- Jay became a core driver of user engagement. Participants often paused to interact with him during tests, unexpectedly skewing usability test times because of it.
- Users found the process very enjoyable and motivating.
- Usability tests identified one UX gap in tracking process to be refined in future iterations.