Whereas students have become accustomed to life in the digital age as evidenced by their heavy usage of social media networks like Facebook & WhatsApp, their mode of learning in school still rely heavily on physical textbooks.
Flip set out to solve this problem by creating a mobile experience that makes learning fun, easy and effective.
The initial design exploration was built around the idea of making textbooks, videos and quizzes available to students on their mobile devices.
Initial design exploration
Upon testing this prototype with the target users, some challenges were uncovered. Consuming video content takes a huge toll on internet data and considering the high cost of data bundles, it was going to be difficult getting students to watch videos. In addition, students viewed ebooks not much differently than physical textbooks in terms of how much work they still had to put into reading them. Since the goal was to make learning fun and easy, that wasn’t going to cut it.
The next iteration of the design was built on the idea of topic summaries. Rather than have students go through textbooks, topics are summarized into easy-to-consume bits.
Onboarding flow
Students were already used to consuming information on social media in bits e.g. the story features on WhatsApp, Instagram etc. With this format, they could flip through a topic summary in minutes and learn key points.
Discovering and reading topic summaries
Another key feature was building in a rank system to encourage students to keep learning. The more topic summaries they complete, the higher the rank they attain. This could also serve as bragging rights and social credibility for users, which in turn powers a word-of-mouth/referral loop.