Kola Ojo.
Designing a Learning Management System to inspire change
Inspire Africa
Inspire Africa is an NGO empowering underserved youths across Africa with entrepreneurial skills and leadership education.
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Headquarters
Lagos, Nigeria
Engagement period
Jan 2021 - Mar 2021
Role
Contract product designer
Collaborators
Chukwukwa Ezeoke, Uduak Ekpo
Contributions
Research Analysis, Information architecture, Product illustrations, UI design, Prototyping
Inspire Africa is an non-governmental organisation empowering underserved youths across Africa with entrepreneurial leadership education.
By the end of 2020, Inspire Africa had trained over 4,000 Nigerian youth, funded over 300 business ventures, and created over 3000 jobs through the IGL Digital Transformation. They were ready to 10x their impact.
The Challenge
Until now, the program had been completely manual. Cohorts were run using Google Drive links, Excel sheets, WhatsApp groups and Zoom. As more students were enrolling with it year, running cohorts was quickly becoming cumbersome.
I was brought in on a contract to work with the internal team to design & handoff a robust, web-based LMS that could be white-labelled and sold to other NGOs too.
This was the first question I asked when their internal designer reached out to me. The answer? Asides that a custom platform would further help solidify their brand and earn revenue, Inspire Africa’s curriculum was very peculiar.
Their learning experience included teams & mentors, courses & challenges. They couldn’t just upload their materials to a learning platform. They had to build something that catered to the various users.
Inspire Africa had worked with an external research agency to interview students, mentors and administrators upon completion of their last cohort. This data provided us an informed base to start off from.
So the natural first step in the process was looking through the research notes. I worked with internal designer, Chukwuka Ezeoke, and another contract designer, Udauk Ekpo,to review the notes, layout insights and highlight areas that required more clarification.
The Admin
The LMS needed to be designed in a way that allowed the administrators create courses and challenges, add students & group them into teams, assign mentors, and monitor progress.
The Student
Students needed to be able to access courses and challenges, view their teammates progress on joint projects, and interact with mentors and the general cohort.
The Mentor
Mentors needed to be able to view teams assigned to them, review and grade assignments, and communicate with team members individually or collectively.
Why not just use Teachable?
Going through the research
Creating connections
Blocking out wireframes
PREV.
FairMoney MFB
NEXT.
Bento
After syncing with the product stakeholders to clarify the vision for the product, it was time to start mapping out what the product would eventually become.
I worked with Chukwuka to develop a mind map and then individual sitemaps for the various products.
After reviewing and aligning on the information architecture with the team, it was time to build out low fidelity wireframes detailing what interactions and layout for the various pages would look like. This was where I took over the project fully, wire-framing initial concepts, and sharing them with the team.
It was important we walked the engineering team through the wireframes as early as possible so they could start ground work. As they were going to building some custom APIs, we had involved them in the process since we started mapping out the information architecture.
Mindmap for the proposed LMS product
Developing a style guide
Drawing from the mood board we had put together, I developed a detailed style guide and component library to speed up the work flow and smoothen the hand-off process.
Administrators are able to create detailed courses and challenges for their cohorts. Like most e-learning products, it was designed to accommodate for video lessons, reading lessons, and quizzes. Courses could also be certified.
On the dashboard, the Admin is able to see analytics on every course running on the LMS. They have the ability to further drill into specific courses to see everything from completion rates to student reviews.
Students are able to take reading and video lessons on the platform. They can track their learning progress and also take quizzes. Asides this they can interact with their team members and all other people within their cohort.
The Solution
At the end of 3 months, we were able to handoff a fully-customisable web app. The product is still in development. This project was a great learning experience for me, some major takeaways were:
Contracting with an internal design team
Contracting with an internal design team was a different dynamic. We had to learn how to share work: what parts were team efforts, and what part would be owned individually.
Wireframing as tool for clarity
The LMS was very unique and a lot of elements of it needed to be prototyped and reviewed. Developing wireframes and low-fidelity screens help the team & I work through the major flows. We were able to bounce ideas of management and engineering before committing more time into building a style guide and high-fidelity screens.
Result & Learnings
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