Blackboard Radio

Client

Blackboard Radio

Duration

2018 - 2019

Role

Design Lead

Task

Build a mobile - first, AI-powered - personalised English speaking coach for school going students in Tier II and III cities in India.

Overview

School going students in India - especially in smaller towns and cities still lack a proper environment to build their English speaking skills in. Even if they are given the proper ‘theoretical’ education in their schools, they would still lack in terms of resources that would help them build fluency in conversational English.  Blackboard Radio, a young startup, wanted to build a virtual, mobile - first environent that would give such kids tools to rehearse and test out their spoken English skills in.

I joined the team at Blackboard Radio in July 2018 and started leading the design there. During my one year of tenure at the firm we designed and developed multiple iterations of the core app, handled the marketing and even started dabbing into some print works to build an entire system of products that would work cohesively to tackle the challenges the company was going after.

Client

Blackboard Radio

Task

Build a mobile - first, AI-powered - personalised English speaking coach for school going students in Tier II and III cities in India.

Duration

2018 - 2019

Overview

Role

Design Lead

Strategy

User Experience

User Interface

Marketing

Print Design

UX/UI

The First Version

The very first version we shipped after I joined the Blackboard Radio team. Staying true to the founders’ vision of a very minimalistic design language, this version makes quite a good use of negative space. The final output was a very clean and sleek looking design.

Indian users are very familiar with the idea of using their mobile numbers as a simple means to sign up. Hence the use of the phone number & OTP mechanism for this process.

Home

The primary place where all the content consumption would take place on the app. Divided into two sections - the personalised feed of the user; and the globally featured content.

Playlists

A place where users would find all the submissions that made it to the Hall of Fame or were chosen as to be the winners.

The Create Section

The central place where the users would create content. Consits of three sections representing the different mechanisms to create content.

Settings

Settings would allow for switching between multiple users as well as giving the option to edit your profile.

UX/UI

The Second Version

After we rolled out the first version of the UI we found a few key areas where we could make improvements in. The first was definitely the Sign Up process - the number of accounts being created without the profile details was way too high and so we had to make sure that we plug that hole by making sure that more users actually fill up rest of the details in their respective profiles. Another aspect that the founders wanted to experiment with was how the engagement would change if they pitched the audio recordings as a daily journal in the lives of the users.

Onboarding

In the earlier version of the app we didn’t have any Walkthrough screens so we made sure to have a set of one in this iteration. The Log In and OTP process was also made a little more streamlined.

Profile completion

As stated above, one of the goals of this version was to increase the number of users who would fill out all the required details as part of their profile on the app. To enable this we broke down the entire profile completion process into multiple steps hence reducing the number of actions per screen effectively making the process slightly easier.

Profile

Pitching the app as a daily journal in the lives of the users was one of the goals of this release. Hence we created a ‘Timeline’ view of all the audio recordings drifitng away from a plain old audio representation of the previous version.

UX/UI | Work in progress

BBR Spell Bee

Another product offering as part of the BBR (Blackboard Radio) brand would be the BBR Spell Bee - a daily live quiz where users would compete by guessing and answering correct spellings of pronunctiations being asked to them - essentially like a typical Spell Bee. This product is still in development so only the UX is being presented here in the form of wireframes.

Home (Wireframes)

Primarily users would engage in two activities - either they could join the live quiz to win prizes or they could practice and assess their performance essentially training themselves for when the quiz would go live. They would also have access to all the relevant stats on their profile and would be able to view the global leaderboards.

The UI

The UI would be a departure from the minimalistic design language of the core app but would still inherit the core values of the Blaackboard Radio identity.

Visual

Print Design + Marketing

Alongside the UX/UI works on the core product, I was also tasked with managing and producing all the print and marketing requirements of the firm. This entire subset of works would range from brochures to study materials (in the form of books) to social media marketing campaigns (in the form of academically informative flyers).

Presented here are a few front and back brochure covers meant for offline marketing. Also presented is a teacher’s manual cover we made for a school we had a tie up with.

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