VOA conecta
Superpowers to remote classes
A project released in 6 weeks by a multidisciplinary team of 7 people, to meet the urgent demands of educators around the world, in which I wore different hats: from business strategist to product discovery, interface designer, and project manager.
VOA conecta was a free Google Meet plugin that helped engage students in the remote class through real-time reactions and quizzes, crafted to relieve the impact of Covid in the everyday life of schools (or any organization) in the world.
#business_strategy #UI #UX
Context
2020 was an important year for edtech VOA educação - the company in which I am a co-founder. We had great k-12 schools as clients - that enjoyed our social-emotional analytics product - and a sharp roadmap for the following months.
Expectations and excitement were high at the beginning of a new school year when three times as many students would be social-emotionally assessed by their teachers using our app.
We all know what happened next. Covid-19 suddenly forced schools to shut their doors overnight. Different from many edtechs that surfed the remote class wave, VOA educação felt a negative impact because it relies on educators' observations on their students to collect data. When all of a sudden, the interaction was through a computer screen, our product became the least priority for schools, that had more urgent problems to address.
What can we do?
After countless conversations among the company leaders and some partner schools, we decided that we had to use our experience as an edtech to tackle some of the brand new problems that teachers and students were facing.
Design Sprint
We ran a 5-day Design Sprint to learn more about the problem, come up with the first ideas and test them in a short period. Starting on a Monday I facilitated the process of interviewing experts, mapping the journey, researching benchmark solutions, sketching ideas, and making decisions as a group. On the fourth day, I built a Figma prototype which was used on Friday´s tests. I then conducted 5 interviews with teachers that led the group to believe we could build a valuable product.
We discovered that a big problem teachers were going through was related to the lack of real-time feedback from students, the non-verbal language people use when interacting live. Teachers reported that they were lost on whether their students were following the class or not. To make it worse, we heard from students (who mostly had their cameras off) that in many cases they were distracted by other online tasks during their classes.
“I don’t know if the student who
turned off the camera is watching
Netflix on a different tab”
Pablo Magalhães, Physics teacher
Hands-on
After doing some research on the platforms used for remote education, we decided that building an extension for Google Chrome - to work on Meets - would be the best start considering our target.
I dove into refining the product features and creating its UI while the engineers started researching technologies, and coding the back and front end. We worked very well as a multidisciplinary team, interacting constantly, in order quickly address the new challenges. Within 10 days we had a working beta and gathered the company in a Google Meet for the first group test.
The experience was beyond expected. Sending one-click emoji reactions that floated on the screen while a colleague was talking felt much more human. Without interrupting one´s speech we could send love, congratulate, agree, disagree, question, raise hands or send 24 different emojis that were carefully curated for k-12 students. Once an emoji was sent, it got stacked on the reactions pile for a few seconds, giving others a chance to click on it and letting the speaker have a notion of how many people share that feeling. We had a blast testing and noticed that our communication became much more fluid. From that day on we weren´t able to have a company meeting without the new tool anymore.
The Product
The visual interface was a collapsable floating bar for all users and had special controls for educators. If the reactions were ever a distraction during class, teachers could block them to all users. Besides the floating emoji reactions, the first release would have two other features: Checkpoint and Quiz.
Checkpoint is a visual prompt, to every student´s screen, asking "Are you following?" where they would click "yes, go on" or "no, I have questions". It could be easily triggered by the teacher every time they felt the need to "hear" from their students.
Quiz is a way for teachers to quickly assess their students about a subject in a few steps: typing a question and multiple choice alternatives, setting the answer timer, and exploring the results.
The Launch
Before facing this challenge, VOA was established as a B2B company and all the clients were Brazilian schools. So we were going out of our comfort zone when decided to release the new product to any organization or individual user in the world for free.
We had been calling the project "VOA reações" (which translates "VOA reactions" from Portuguese) since we held the Design Sprint and we felt the need to work on that. Before going public I ran a Naming process to strategically define what it should be called. Its name should be global, self-explanatory, and bring along the name of our company: VOA. Its attributes should cover: "feedback", "giving voice to students", "being receptive" and "bringing the physical classroom to virtual space". After shortlisting 7 names out of 50, we elected "VOA conecta". I then created a logo and a landing page connected to VOA´s visual identity.
In less than 30 days we had a bilingual Extension available on Google Play Store for free to everyone. We started following and analyzing its usage by conducting qualitative interviews and by analyzing quantitative data - on Amplitude - that showed us users' behavior, locations, and even the most clicked emojis.
A common request was the possibility to make one-click attendances for each class. This feature was soon developed and integrated into the Extension.
Business Model / Dashboard
The extension was free for everyone in order to support a large number of educators around the world. While building it we started to discuss ideas to also make it profitable. We understood that we could deliver extra value for individuals (or organizations) who where willing to pay a monthly fee. Data visualization has always been a pilar of VOA and we learned from our new users that the data generated in each VOA conecta class was really valuable to teachers.
Teachers loved the idea of analyzing the history of students' interactions not only to improve and plan new classes but also to grade individual participation, commitment, and their learning.
We then decided to work on a dashboard for educators. To quickly address this challenge, we started off with the social-emotional dashboard framework we had built before (using Ant Design design system). I sketched the architecture information and screen layouts in Figma to display attendance lists, quiz results, and checkpoints.
Making hard decisions
We never deployed VOA conecta´s dashboard. Our team of educators had been working on adapting our main product to assess social-emotional competences in a remote context. And all of a sudden, the contracts that were frozen were running again. We didn´t have enough resources to keep both products simultaniously and decided to go back to the company´s original roadmap.
What have I learned
Even being an experienced designer, this was also my first time working in a fully remote team. The project itself was like a roller coaster ride where I lived several different product phases and emotions in a short period. The team knew each other very well and worked like a perfect machine from zero to one in record-breaking time. It was really exciting to get feedback from teachers who loved our product and closely follow growing metrics that reached users in countries we never expected. I learned a lot about product discovery, strengthened my UI design and project management skills, B2C models, Product Market Fit, marketing, and making tough business decisions.
On September, 23rd, between 10-11am, VOA conecta peaked 7,758 unique users in a single hour and 30% of our users came from São Paulo and Las Vegas on that week.
