Jotlines

Overview

Jotlines was an initiative by a group of engineers to help junior and fellow engineers find study notes for exams in an easy way without wasting much time or spending more on purchasing books.

To allow students search for notes of their choice of subjects or by posting queries. The platform also allows students to get free mentorship from subject experts.

My Role

Worked as a solo designer and contributed end-to-end design process.

Deliverables

5

Hifi Designs

5

Styleguide

Challenges

M

Students in engineering college finds difficult to prepare notes for exam due to less available resources

M

No much mentoring available

M

Need to go through multiple books at times to prepare notes on certain topic

Tools

5

Adobe XD

5

Miro

5

Figma

5

Trello

Solution

A search feature to allow users easily find notes of their choice. Also the same feature has been added so that we can track user requirements and provide content accordingly in the platform or allow SMEs from domains related to maxium search keyword
The request notes feature has been added so that, resources or notes can be made available based on users request.

Key impact

The app was initially launched in Assam state. Post launch, it was initially downloaded by more then 500+ students. Some of the key highlights we tracked.

Return Users – 65%
Notes downloaded – 1000+
Notes requested – 200+
Mentorship sessions – 650+

Creative process

As the concept was very new so the process I followed was the iterative Design Thinking approach which helped me to refine the product design based on user feedback captured.

The project started by conducting a workshop with the client team to understand the business goals and defined the metrics that would help to measure the experience for project success.

Business goals

To deep dive into students actual needs and validate the pain points shared from business.
To understand quantitative data (how much percentage of students have the issue). Do they need help with something else?
To eliminate assumptions, and validate early stage solutions.

Empathize

I did my desk research to understand the concept a bit more and started exploring if any similar applications exists which can help me to learn the concept model and their experience. And to my surprise there is no application available with a combined solution as the project.

As I was unable to find any data from my secondary desk research so I planned to connect with users to learn their experiences, goals, challenges, etc. which will help me to drive the next steps.

Research insights

To analyze the research data, I followed Thematic analysis. The insights and key findings

%

Time consuming

%

Require study notes

%

Mentorship

Define

The insights received from the User Interviews actually made my work easier to drive the remaining process. In this phase, I presented the research findings with the client team, along with a Journey Map to prioritize the features so that we can focus on ideating and release the MVP. My goals in this phase was to

To discuss the opportunities in user’s journey and map out the activities.
To understand different tasks user might be willing to perform based on their stories by creating HMW (How Might We) questions.

Some of the HMW questions from the workshop

How might we make customer aware of the application?
How might we make notes/documents search easier?
How might we verify duplicate contents?
How might we make trust customer for online payment?

Ideation

After lot of user interactions and connect, finally we arrived at solutioning. So, I organized a brainsorming session where we followed the Crazy 8 method. The workshop included several stakeholders from client – developers, product manager, sales team & few users.

The reason, I went ahead with this approach, was to get the diverse ideas from both users and business. The Persona & Journey Map helped me during the workshop to remain focused on the scenarios captured during User Interviews. Followed which we went with sketching the solutions.

As there was a challenge coming up with providing free mentorship due to business reasons and get quality mentors to provide free services we decided during the ideation to release the first version with only sharing & searching of notes. We also came up with the concept of having two different application one for User & another for Admin.

Started with Task analysis for both the roles to understand how the users will navigate through the product and map out the edge cases.

For users

Search notes or mentors on specific topics
Request for notes or mentorship session on specific topic of users choice
Sharing of notes with others

For admin

Approval for notes published in platform
Request for notes or mentorship session on specific topic of users choice
Sharing of notes with others

Design

Created wireframes to validate the content layout for the app based on the moodboard & inspiration captured. After creating the hifi mockups I also performed Usability testing to validate the usability issues.