Flow by Yandex.Practicum

Flow help people learn English by online. Being the product designer and working with supply team I was responsible for tutors part of this product.

How does it work?

Students improve their English skills by passing interactive stories. And there is a speaking session at the end of each story, which they can schedule. Speaking session is 15 minutes thematical excercise with native-speaking tutor. Every two weeks, students meet their mentor to define the weaknesses and get some feedback.

Problems that we were going to solve by tutor’s product

We’ve defined 4 core problems:
1. Scheduling — at the beginning tutors were using Slack to negotiate their schedule between each other.
2. Motivation — we had no motivation instruments at all, and we also had a rough unit economic. So it was not guaranted that we could provide a speaking sessions for our tutors all the time.
3. Guidelines notification — we were using Notion to provide a guidelines that was updated every time, so someone could miss the updates.
4. Collaborative work — our students were nervous at their first speaking session and sometimes didn’t visit it even though it had been scheduled.

Motivation

We had the only one developer to create all of this features in short time. So we decided to start from features that we weren’t going to spend a lot of time on it. And first was a sessions history screen, we made it as a simple table.

This way we partially closed the motivation problem. At the beginning it was not so quick for tutors to get and track their personal statistic and we’ve fixed this with releasing the history sessions feature. It helped tutors to stay tuned and create their daily goals. And as we’ve noticed in our Slack — some tutors shared their statistic between each other.

Collaborative work

As I said before — our students was nervous at their first speaking session. It was so paradoxal thing, because the value of our product was to prepare our students for speaking in any context. The first of these contexts was speaking with a tutor.

Classroom

One of our product hypothesis sounded like “good educational experience is combination of collaborative work and emotions”. We’ve transformed it in the scheme.

Emotions create motivation, so we need to pay much more attention to it. We’ve found speaking as the most emotional part of our product, because it was about people interaction between each other. And here we’ve redesigned our classroom interface.

At the release day of Flow there were 1000 students, who scheduled speaking session, and only half of them attended. We increased attendance by classrom UI impovements and communication design from 50% to 75%.

Follow up

As I said before, every two weeks students meet their mentor to define weaknesses and get some feedback. At the end of each meeting, mentor provides student a follow up. We had no markup tools in our product, so our mentors used 3rd party markup tools and sometimes they lost important information. So we decided to release our own.

We made a panel inside the classroom. As you can see on the image above, we added stickers that we’ve found the most preferable and the simplest tool. It was much easier for mentors to add the stickers than markup the text. Notes were also splitted in shared and personal (hidden from student).

Features that we haven’t released

Everyone who was working in a startup knows that there could be a lot of nice ideas, but it isn’t always possible to realize it for some reasons. There is a couple of features and concepts that we left in our backlog but I would like to share it with you.

Random chat

I’ve noticed that some students were trying to socialize when they were getting nervous. My idea was to give them opportunity to socialize before the session starts.

Unfortunately, we have not developed this feature, because we had not development resources. We've focused on classroom to find the ways to solve our problems, and left this feature in our backlog.

Tutor dashboard

Unfortunately, scheduling & guidelines were the fields that we hadn’t some features for, because we were pivoting so fast. It worked despite it was not perfect. Notion was our instrument for posting and update guidelines. Slack was our instrument for tutor scheduling. So here I’m going to show you design concept of this features in combo.

Outcome

We’ve increased attendance by classrom UI impovements and communication design from 50% to 75%. We’ve got some feedback that our product is so emotional and looks like a sitcom. We’ve made some improvements to avoid tutors and mentors common mistakes and increased their workflow speed. And we haven’t spent a lot of resources on it, cause we used some 3rd party instruments at some points.

What we’ve learned

1. Good educational experience is about emotions
2. Emotions is not always about an interactive part. Sometimes it’s about something usual (as speaking with your close friend).
3. Progress defining by educational process quality
4. Social features make sense especially when you need to avoid stressful points in your product
5. Some 3rd party instruments might be the part of your product
6. Emotions are so abstract metric, in this case qualitative research is more preferable than quantitative