Crossminds Test

OVERVIEW

Crossminds is a startup dedicated to empowering tech professionals to achieve their learning goals. I joined the team at an early stage and built the core product from scratch. The desktop and mobile web are fully launched in 2021.

To improve the experience of both learners and content creators, our team designed key features such as reaction board, note board, and supportive chrome plugin tools.

PROBLEM

Tech professionals have constant learning needs but often fail to achieve their learning goals

Professionals working in the tech circle constantly need to learn about new tech concepts and work skills due to the fast-paced nature of the industry. However, 85% of the tech professionals we interviewed reported that they haven’t found an ideal way to achieve such learnings.

RESEARCH

Understanding the real reasons that cause people to fail their goal

To discover hidden opportunities, we utilized 3 research methods to dive deep into the problem and understand the reasons behind users’ behavior:

95
Online Survey

To understand general information about users’ current learning situation

12
Contextual Inquiry

To observe users' behavior within specific contexts and learn their behaviors.

8
Semi-structure Interviews

To learn how users plan and manage their learning goals and materials in a longer-term

After synthesizing information we gathered from surveys and interviews, we identified 3 top reasons that further guided us in defining the design opportunitiy:

ITERATE - USER ENGAGEMENT

How to make this platform more engaging for tech professionals?

To tailor the platform for the our audience, we try to further understand what might engage them. We found that:

Therefore, we wanted to build an active learning community that can potentially make the learning experience more engaging. With this in mind, we made our initial design exploration:

Initial Design: A twitter-like discussion feed to encourage discussions on learning

We thought a discussion feed would encourage people to share and ask questions about their learning freely. However, during testing, we had some new findings from users:

Iterated Design: A discussion board with timestamp function to enable lighter interactions and efficient navigation

Users can easily engage with the community by leaving text or emoji reactions and quickly navigate to relevant learning information by clicking timestamps.

ITERATE - NOTE TAKING

How to support effective learning for long term knowledge retention?

Note-taking is an essential tool that could help retain new knowledge. But many learners are facing problems in terms of managing notes:

Therefore, we wanted to offer a good tool for users to manage notes so they can easily review them with associated videos.

Initial Design: Attach notes to video progress bar for better video-notes association

Our intuitive thought was to put notes onto the progress bar, thinking that users can now easily associate notes with the relevant part of the video . However, we soon realize that when users return to review these notes, seeing them being displayed separately makes it inconvenient to synthesize information or make flexible edits.

Iterated Design: A note board with timestamps to enable flexible organizing and editing of notes

This feature received very positive feedbacks from users. They mention that this note board save them lots of time by not having to switch between their own note docs and the videos anymore.

Crossminds

CONTEXT

TEAM

OVERVIEW

PROBLEM

RESEARCH

IDEATE & EXPLORE

ITERATE - USER ENGAGEMENT

ITERATE - NOTE TAKING

DESIGN SYSTEM