Amazon Academy

Helping students to achieve their engineering college dreams
Product Overview
In 2019, Amazon wanted to bridge to gap of accessible education in India by providing affordable, high quality online teaching. We then launched Amazon Academy, a platform for engineering students in India to prepare for JEE and NEET exams.

Features: Test, practice, videos,
live lectures and doubt clearance,tip of the day
‍
Platforms: Android app, desktop webapp
My Role
UX Designer
‍
User Research, User Interface Design, Design System, Prototyping, User Testing, Visual Design

2019 - 2022

I have led the design for Amazon Academy since 2020

As Amazon's first foray into the Ed-tech space, we have key wins to celebrate.

  • 5M+ downloads on Google Play

  • High NPS score of 53 (-100 to +100 scale) for paid users
  • 2 paid course students ranked 99 percentile in JEE Main, 6 cleared to Advanced exams
“Just want share my feedback on Amazon academy... it's a great and right institute for students who are aspiring for NEET examination. My son got admission in June.

Teachers and academic buddy, the way of guidance to student is really amazing. So many test papers for students to solve and more importantly answering their doubt and guiding them for exam, teaching them on time management during exam."

Parent of NEET student, feedback e-mail
‍

“Good app especially for NEET and JEE preparation they teach many question in live class even provide DPP to solve and even a set of question in practice slot. I recommend to go with Amazon academy”

Student, NPS survey testimonial

I delivered end-to-end experiences for

Learning features

Payments

Design System

Web and Marketing

Details of the project

Background of Amazon Academy
In India, engineering exams are one of the most prestigious exams with 1.2M students applying and only 30K qualifying in the end.

Majority of famous coaching institutes for these exams are in Tier 1 cities, with highly expensive tuition fees. Tier 2 and 3 students have lesser high quality options available, especially smaller towns.

From our research, these were the common pain points from students:
‍

Aspirers (Majority of students not in top 1% of cohort)

  • Ambiguity on current level of test preparation readiness for desired rank, not enough JEE standard mock tests
  • Lack of access to high quality practice questions
  • Lack of in-depth analytical reports showcasing strengths and weaknesses, and how to iprove their score

Self-study students (Students who prepare on their own)

  • Same pain points as Aspirers + lack of motivation
  • No personalised guidance to improve score and rank
  • Need engaging learning content to increase concept clarity
Our challenge was to help students secure high scores in competitive exams by providing a holistic preparation that includes live classes, high-quality content, and data analytics backed teaching.

Today, Amazon Academy is an online learning platform for engineering students in India to prepare for JEE and NEET exams.
My role in detail
I was hired as the second designer when Amazon Academy was gearing towards its beta launch (JEEReady) in 2019, through a large-scale mock test event as validation of the demand. My challenge then was to help Amazon Academy scale towards a cross-platform and multi-exam test experience.

Since then, we have expanded to a full suite of learning features. I have led the design of Amazon Academy since 2020 onwards.
‍
Here are the key responsibilities in my role –

End-to-end feature owner

Partnering with product manager and user researcher to translate customer findings to features. Collaborating with front-end engineers to implement product features to Android and webapp platforms.

  • Delivered test experience with senior designer
  • Guided co-designer to deliver live lectures experience
  • Delivered daily digest, learning videos, payments as a solo designer

Created design system

I led a team of 3 designers to create a design system in collaboration with front-end engineers. I used industry best practices, accessibility guidelines and reusability to inform design decisions.

Strategy for evolving product

Worked with product manager to uncover insights from quantitative data, validated by user research, to set the strategy for the product post-launch evolution. Key project on this was improving product discovery.

Prominent work on
learning features
Daily Digest‍
Improving Product Discovery
Featured detailed case study

Helping students to study smarter, faster with a daily tip

The Opportunity

Students are overloaded with material and tasks assigned from their schools. The existing content in our app are 3h-long tests or 60-question practice sessions. One of the pain points identified from self-study students was the lack of engaging learning content, which causes them to lose motivation even further.

Hence, my product manager and I teamed up for this goal – how can we allow students to learn a concept effectively on the go?
‍
My Role
I delivered the full user experience and visual design of this project. My first feature deliverable :)

As the second designer in the team then, I helped to create some illustrations for the learning content too.

Tasks: User Research, User Interface Design, Design System, Prototyping, User Testing, Illustration

The Team
1 designer, 1 researcher, 1 product manager, 1 content manager, 4 engineers
‍
Year
2019
Kickoff
We first conducted a study with 6 participants in Pondicherry, learning about their day-to-day schedule and challenges in their preparation journey. This was the main challenge identified –
‍

Lack of guidance for preparation; low confidence

  • No personalised guidance to improve score and rank
  • Time management is a struggle, for both solving the paper and preparation-wide
  • No aid to guide how to attempt the paper
We also tested various concepts for the kind of guidance they found useful for learning preparation, through concept cards.
‍

Tips seen as highest value add to learning

  • Tips to solve a question faster seen as most relevant by students. Also regarded as a unique differentiator compared to competitor apps.
  • Other ideas like Speed and Accuracy challenges not seen different compared to regular practice sessions, and are potentially demotivating.
  • Gamification elements like badges were not seen as key motivation factors.
(left) Study with participants in Pondicherry · (right) Sample of concept cards used
Defining user flow
Based on the learnings, I brainstormed on how a daily learning digest catered to a student’s preparation journey, could result in a delightful experience.
‍
Afterwards, my product manager and I collaborated with the content team to learn what was most valuable to a student.

These were 3 possible content formats that we had carved out for the flow –

Early flows and validating concept

Testing prototype

Being a new idea, we were careful to validate our ideas early on, to ensure it is meaningful to students. We brought a prototype of Daily Digest to 8 students in Bangalore – showcasing a remediation session based on a weaker topic identified from a previous test (Format 2 in Flow Diagram). We continued to test concept cards to find out what type of tips resonate with students.

Prototype flow: Incorrect concept will be reinforced, followed by 3 questions of the same concept to test retention of concept. Recommendation of practice session before ending the session
Flow used for prototype - Remediation session based on weaker topic, showcasing shortcut tips for smarter solving
‍
‍

Key findings from user testing

“Shortcut trick is an instant saviour. Show me the tricks first, then Concept”
– 11th Grade, IIT aspirant – Class 11 Aspirant

Final designs

These findings helped us to zoom into tips, shortcut tricks as a priority. Based on technical and content feasibility, we decided that starting with Tip of the Day would give us lowest hanging fruits.

Remediation was not taken up as we were an early stage product, with no personalisation capability anytime soon.
‍

Impact till 2022

Daily Digest was meant to be a supplementary feature to help students learn on the go, on top of the main forms of preparation like practice and live lectures. We have fulfilled our objective, with impact being –
‍

Receiving >94% likes by students, for

"Teachers are good. Daily tips In app are good. All India Mock tests, Part tests, chapter tests etc all are best"
Student, NPS survey testimonial
"It get access to pay subscription fee in two terms.best faculty access. Doubt clearance. Practice session, test modules helps us the most and even tips of the day explains concepts briefly."
Student, NPS survey testimonial

2022 - Iterating with bite-sized videos

Since the pandemic, learning videos have been identified to be highly important, through a pricing research in Mar 2020. Video content by our faculty continues to be one of the highly rated content, but the engagement is lacking. Bite-sized videos give us an opportunity to give teaser into our faculty’s engaging teaching.

We took inspiration by video shorts prevalent in social media today, as our users are heavy users of these content.
‍

Experiment metrics

We launched a simpler experiment first, with a basic portrait video (and only “View questions” CTA), to validate our hypothesis.
‍
Experiment with simplified video experience, showcasing our live lecture teacher teaching a concept

We saw positive metrics from the experiment, being –
‍

As we were about to progress further to bring our implemented experience closer to the designs, we received news that our product was going to wind down. This was due to an worldwide organisational decision to focus on main businesses.

While we have not completed the project fully, I learnt how this experimental approach helps us make better decisions regarding design improvements and in a fast manner.
‍

Interested in other case studies?

Check out other projects related to the product
‍
Payments
Delivering full payments experience
Improving Product Discovery
Recapturing the simplicity of learning

Want to get in touch? Or curious about the process for other features?

Drop me a line!

CONTACT ME
Content © 2022 by Gladys Loh · Powered by Webflow
E-mAILLINKEDIN