No two people learn the same way, and practice routines should be treated as such. Stratejay aims to be your personal coach throughout anything you want to learn!

Users have difficulty with time-management and maintaining motivation when learning a new skill, which hinders and sometimes halts their self-improvement journey.

Design an app that personalizes a user’s routine to engage them more in the subject matter at hand, and learn more effectively and sustainably over longer periods of time.

I am a naturally curious person that loves to learn new skills often on my own. However, that does come with a set of challenges when approaching a new topic. Where do I start? What’s the best approach? What do I do if I’m not seeing progress? Sometimes it’s not just about the quality and quantity of information, but about the best strategy to employ to retain and apply that information.

Driven by a combined interest in self-development, my team and I set out to see how we can improve the self-learning process.

When considering the various benefits of existing learning resources (books, Youtube, Coursera, Reddit etc), and there were four things that kept popping up in conversation.

1. Customizability to lifestyle and skill level
2. Accountability
3. Depth of information
4. Structure

While these may not perfectly cover all the resources out there, we felt it was a great starting point to develop our research goals.

Aside from the available educational resources, our team quickly realized how varied our preferences and capabilities are in approaching new subject matter. From visual learners, note-takers, to hands-on practitioners, there’s no one-size-fits all for each individual to learn at peak effectiveness.This raised quite a few more questions! Thus we wanted to understand the following:

- How do people approach learning new skills?
- Why do they learn new skills?
- What hinders or halts their self-development journey?
- What are users’ expectations from online learning?

We conducted 2 rounds of user interviews and one set of surveys. While the first round of interviews pointed us in the right direction, there were not enough actionable responses, thus we conducted a second round of interviews to dive deeper into our users’ thinking process.

I designed the first user interview questions to be broad in scope, but when reviewing the answers, we felt it provided a better direction but not enough actionable responses. Thus I designed a second round to dive deeper into the answers. We found the following from the sum of our interviews:

Using an empathy map and affinity diagram, we were able to identify the most prevalent pain points, advantages and approaches to self-learning our users take.

Our data showed that while learning is a multi-faceted problem, time and motivation are key factors affecting most of our user’s learning journey. Thus...

During the early brainstorming stages, one of the ideas  we tossed around was an app that acted as “a coach for anything you want to improve in”. After conducting our research, this idea still resonated well with the problem at hand!

Having the app act as a personal coach provides several opportunities to cohesively solve several issues at once. An A.I. coach can:

1. Be more personable than an average goal-setting app
2. Provide entertainment through various forms of communication
3. Customize its approach to fit user goals and feedback
4. Serve as a fun and recognizable visual element
5. Add to the gameficiation factors of the app

My first priority was to design the main page that our users would interact with the strategies they have chosen. I wanted Jay to be consistently present throoughout the process, while clearly identifying the user’s overall progress, strategies, and ability to add or customize their current tasks.

As a team we prioritized tasks that coincided with the key features of the app, which is the main strategy management, Jay’s adaptive personalized system, and rewards archive (designed to enhance engagement). Given the high level of customizability and engagement, we wanted the experience to start right away. We integrate these elements in the onboarding process, which became our final task.

Users found the process very enjoyable! In fact, we initially timed our users as a way to compare our users’ task success rate, however every single one of our users stopped at multiple frames to compliment and engage with Jay so much so that the data became skewed.

The only hiccup we experienced was in completing the daily tasks. Some users found the process a bit unintuitive. They were unsure of what to do and what to click on to get to the next step. We would conduct more research on this stage in the future to streamline the process more!

With all that said, all users felt Jay would be huge motivator and aid in their personal learning journey!

Users found the process very enjoyable! In fact, we initially timed our users as a way to compare our users’ task success rate, however every single one of our users stopped at multiple frames to compliment and engage with Jay so much so that the data became skewed.

The only hiccup we experienced was in completing the daily tasks. Some users found the process a bit unintuitive. They were unsure of what to do and what to click on to get to the next step. We would conduct more research on this stage in the future to streamline the process more!

With all that said, all users felt Jay would be huge motivator and aid in their personal learning journey!

Designing a resource that is adequate to not just cater to all subject matter, but also for all styles of learning proved quite a lot more challenging than we had anticipated.In the future, we’d like to implement more user-input forms so that users can create, recommend and rate strategies for others. This would allow for the bank of strategies to grow organically, while also giving us feedback on how to adapt to different subject matter.