Sparkademy
Future-Proof Your Business | June 2020 ~ July 2021 (1 year + 1 month)
About
Sparkademy is an ed-tech startup (20-25 employees) based in Zurich, Switzerland. Sparkademy brings personalized and scalable learning to the corporate world, helping employees develop innovation & leadership skills and achieve their full professional potential, thus future-proofing their businesses from within. Some client companies include Cargill, Siemens, and Phillip Morris International.
As the sole designer of the company, I was responsible for establishing design principles and a design system, leading a UI/UX overhaul of Sparkademy’s products, and leading the design process of many exciting projects.
A Single Source of Truth
When I joined Sparkademy, the company was less than 6 months old, and there wasn’t a unified user experience. The learning platform was an MVP designed by two software engineers, users had to use several 3rd party platforms to learn, and Sparkademy had been receiving countless user complaints and clarification request emails on a daily basis.
From the company’s internal design process to the consumer-facing platform and experience, I was responsible for helping Sparkademy become more user-centric and improving the overall user experience of Sparkademy’s products.
The first step I took was assessing all the UX issues present in the overall user experience. I then established design principles and a design system, a single source of truth, to lay the foundations to a consistent and user-centric design/development environment.
The Sparkademy Platform
Creating the design system had allowed me to address the issue of inconsistency with the visual design, but the issue of incoherency with the overall platform and user flow still had to be addressed. To do so, I analyzed the existing flow of the platform and created a new flow that is much more efficient. While the previous platform requires the user to go through 5 steps to begin/resume the course upon logging in, my design provides a single-step pathway to their course and a complete overview of their learning journey on a single page.
My Role
Building upon the design principles and design system I created (work above), I took lead of the whole redesigning process of the Sparkademy platform.
UI/UX and heuristic evaluations of existing platform
Wireframing and low to high fidelity prototyping
Entire UI/UX design and facilitating designer-engineer handoff
Setting up user engagement tracking with Heap Analytics and Intercom
Impact
Average NPS Score increase from −4 (before I joined) to 20 (since my work started being implemented)
Amount of clarification requests/emails per week dropped by an estimated 85%
An Intuitive & Fully Integrated Assignment + Grading Platform
After conducting extensive user research, I’ve identified the biggest pain point in the user experience to as the dissatisfaction with the Practical Assignment—a series of course-related exercises that users are required to complete in order to pass the respective module. Users were experiencing difficulties with the overall work & submission process, and they were unhappy with the lack of actionable feedback.
In response, I’ve led the process of creating a Practical Assignment that is fully integrated into the Sparkademy platform. The integration of the Practical Assignment meant the grading system had to adapt accordingly, so I also designed a grading tool for the Sparkademy team in parallel.
My Role
I took lead of the entire design process of both the Practical Assignment and Grading Tool:
Organizing/conducting user interviews
Analyzing insights
Prototyping & testing
Design & handoff of the final product
Creating a video product tutorial
Impact
72% of users are satisfied + highly-satisfied with the new platform (22% neutral)
Decreased the time spent on the grading process of a single assignment by more than 50% (from 30+ minutes to under 15 minutes)
97% would be disappointed if they could no longer receive feedback
Practical Assignment (user-facing) and Grading (internal) process now 100% done on a single platform.
A New Learning Experience
My Role
This project is a joint effort by the research intern, product manager, and myself (UX designer). I was responsible for:
Conducting literature research on the topics of motivation and autonomy to lay the foundations.
Organizing & analyzing user feedback relevant to this project
Creating relevant personas and user journeys of the current and ideal learning experience
Ideating & redesigning the fundamental structure of Sparkademy’s courses/lessons
Designing the entire UI/UX of the new learning platform
Planning the usability testing of the MVP
Note
This project is the final project I worked on at Sparkademy, and it is still in progress after my departure.
Other Work
These are some other projects I’ve worked on at Sparkademy.
