SchoolCraft
Unleash Your Inner Beaver.
A gamified product accepted & yearned by academia who aversed gamification
TL;DR
📲 Product
Industry: Higher Education
Phase: 0-to-1 Product
Type: Web App
Status: Launched in Sep. 2023
📽️ Project
Duration: 8 months
Type: Entrepreneurial
Team:
Project Manager
Design Team (😃Me Leading)
Reseacher (😃Me)
Develop Team
🏋🏻♀️ My Contribution
Primary Market Research ("PMR")
UX Interviews
Prototyping & Testing
Leading Design Team
Level & Character Design
🎯 Goals
Project Goal:
Official MVP launch at MIT MBA School (Sloan)
Boost student profile completion rates
Promote MBA School values through engaging content design and branding
Design Goal:
Elevate the onboarding experience for incoming students with gamification
🎉 Impacts
Research - Kept the team focused with data-driven research
Teamwork - Fostered a cohesive, high-quality design panel through my unique leadership style
Jump to My Learning
The journey from a whimsical class project to a substantial venture was quite the rollercoaster ride.
Background
Have you ever stereotyped MBA students as professional, eloquent, and smart? I did until I delved into the humorous chaos of MBA life during a course Creative Industries at Sloan (MIT MBA School).
Making fun of the ROI of spending $220K for a piece of paper, I initiated the idea of making a Sloan simulation game that poke fun at Sloanies’ two year life, and our in-class team project turned out a blast.
1-min Official Trailer
4-min Demo Walk-through
Quick overview - design process
Encouraged by our professor, we decided to take it from concept to reality - we projected it to the MBA Program Office (”Office”), and…
the story went totally different than expected.
Mission Possible 1 - (Re)Branding?
Problems
Like other ambitious entrepreneurial teams, we had back & forth hot debates concerning:
Expand?
Should we expand to all MBAs or focus on incoming students?
Alter?
Should we explore alternative solutions to the simulation game?
Convince?
How do we prove our deep understanding of MBA life as non-MBA students?
Solutions
Expand? NO!
Not fantastic but practical - Primary market research and user interviews! I concluded that services targeting alumni is harder to manage, because of more uncertainty, lower user stickiness and limited resources & touching points for contact management.
Alter? Yes but slightly!
Interestingly, from the user interviews I learnt that MBA students weren't avid gamers. Instead, they preferred mild gamification. The key insights involve:
Student side
They need:
shorter and more digestible content, flexibility of schedules, to-dos, and
unique personal tags in their profiles setting;
Office side
they have a rich resource pool that has hardly been intensively used by students
what the Office values (e.g., completion rate of student’s profile at Sloan Portal, education on Sloan values) seem unattractive to students.
Considering the huge amounts of time & resource commitment of making a simulation game, we steered to design a gamified experience based on our new finding:
Convince? Yes!
I do think we don’t have to be full-time Sloanies to show that we know MBAs, as long as our content delivery well nails students’ and Office’s needs. Thus, I interviewed current students to enhance our content, asking about their MBA highlights, survival tips for incoming students, and Dos & Don'ts for achieving goals at Sloan.
Results
After the interviews & researches, I convinced the team to stay laser focused on what we excelled at instead of reinventing a mediocre wheel, and we obtained rich enough materials to for content creation!
Mission Possible 2 - Design Delivery
Problems
There was a time when myself got fully occupied and the deadline of delivery was approaching, which pushed me to ponder:
teamwork-wise
how could I deliver the prototype on time with pixel-perfect deliverables?
Design-wise
How could we meet the Office's requirements to encourage students to complete their profiles at the Sloan portal and promote Sloan values engagingly?
Solutions
No more hands? - hiring & manage new designers!
I hired a design team and grew together with them.
I predicted that it would be hard to hire experienced UX/UI designers in a short time, so I suggested hiring some junior designers and I leading them.
I led them with a supportive INFJ leadership style, providing clear expectations, 1-on-1 onboarding, and a focus on efficiency over perfectionism.
To maintain a cohesive tone, I personally handled key visual design, focused on UIUX supervision while let other teammates to charge the graphic & visuals (thinking of them having less pre-assumptions in design and thus more out-of-box ideas).
^^^ Good Example - The wireframe guidance I made for designers VS real UIs in the MVP
^^^ Bad Example - The wirefram guidance I made for designers VS real UIs in the MVP; UX details brutally trimmed
How to make engaging design? gamification!
Leveraging my comic art and storytelling expertise, I introduced two gamification ideas:
Super Mini Simulation Game
A turn-based mini story experience with sarcastic and funny tasks to let students learn what they should do by experiencing what they should not do (e.g., in the story, the avatar beaver has to win nuts by making his prof. or teammates go nuts);
Avatar Customization
An avatar customization experience where students get points to customize their own beaver avatar by filling all required info in the Sloan Portal, and afterwards getting swags of their customized beaver.
Results
What Worked
Design sprint mindset helped the team iterate rapidly without getting bogged down in details.
The sarcastic turn-based simulation mini game turned out a show stopper that attracted many volumes into our MVP.
What did not work
It turned out at the early stage, there were unnecessary back & forth of discussion on the key visuals due to miscommunication. I should have paid more attention to graphic & visual design at the early stage, which could have made the discussion more efficient.
Mission Possible 3 -
Outreach to the Real Market!
Problems
Honestly, marketing was even more challenging than the development of MVP - not because we are unconfident about the market, but because of the timing & methods of outreach:
Timing Conflicts
Outreach clashed with the Sloan Orientation week when target audience were overwhelmed.
Methods & Touching Points
Traditional outreach methods like emails and LinkedIn messages proved ineffective.
Solutions
"Losing Face" Outreach
We made full use of the physical space where Sloanies gather during Orientation breaks to brand ourselves!
We made on-site beaver customization campaigns to attract people, and walk them through major features of the product upon their asking to showcase the product;
Also, we adopted a hybrid outreach method: academic calendar brochures, reaching out to students in clubs and classes, and gathering feedback on the spot.
Results
The losing-face strategy worked very well, attracting on average 8+ new feedback responses in an hour on the campaign day.We also garnered interest from other MIT departments.
The Program Office was astonished by our concept and previously offered $5K funding for development.
Other MIT departments expressed interest in our MVP and asked for future collaborations.
That said, we learned from our target audiences that we could have leveraged Instagram as a more vibrant platform.
Also, many more students asked for an entry from the mobile than we imagined
My Learning
Role wise
Balancing supervision and freedom is crucial, especially under tight deadlines. I could have more voices at the beginning of team formation so that the whole team could have more time in technical commitment instead of administrative back & forth.
UX wise
Think of as many possible user scenarios as possible and map out the most likely ones. What we could have better is to develop the mobile version simultaneously with the web app.
Product wise
Flexibility to pivot and address evolving user needs is crucial. Often, founder teams get attached to their original concepts and are hesitant to make changes. However, we remained committed to prioritizing the needs of the Office and students. This commitment led us to pivot and deliver a solution that may not have been as flashy but was highly effective in solving real problems.
Business wise
Developing a cross-domain mindset and understanding the importance of branding and content delivery is key for a design leader. Users appreciate a product that integrates seamlessly.
