Redesigns are beneficial as they fix existing issues, allow users discover new features, and present fresh designs.

We decided to work on the group’s redesign because Noon Academy has kept its old group design for long, precisely for the last 3 years, but now it is time for maximizing the students’ satisfaction with the group experience through the new redesign.

Major customizations were added to enable teachers to manage and get the best use from their groups in Noon Academy.

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Step one: Understanding

A closer look at how “the group” in Noon Academy looks:

The group in Noon Academy is created by the teacher. Each teacher can create a public/private group for each grade and for each subject he teaches. He can add a name and a description for the group and can either invite or receive invitations from students to join. The teacher also can start schedule live sessions, add assignments, interact with students in the group feed, and do many other activities with his students.

On one hand, we noticed that teachers can be categorized to have one of these use cases (formats) for creating a group:

• Teachers who create a group for explaining the whole curriculum into chapters
• Teachers who create a group to be only for revisions, practicing, and solving questions
• Teachers who create  private and public groups for different reasons
• Teachers who create groups for crash courses for specific parts

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Step two: Identifying existing problems:  ‍

Before joining the group (Non-member view)

• Teacher info is not enough to know the teacher personality well. only the overall rate.
• The student can’t know if this group is active or not.
• The student can’t find anything related to course progress or the content inside the group.

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After joining the group (Member view)

Problems that face students (members in the group):

• POSTS: Seeing different types of posts in one place.  As the feed collectively shows teacher announcements, students questions, students posts, and polls. So, it’s not organized or categorized
• CONTENT: Viewing the scheduled sessions and previous playbacks in one list. So, the content is not divided into chapters and lessons
• ACTIVITIES: Not enough social activities to do inside the group

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Step three: Specify enhancement areas

Before joining the group (Non-member view)

The students see this view when they view a group that they aren’t  a member of.  Most probably it’s their first visit for the group.

The students for sure want a glimpse about what kind of info is shared inside the group to decide whether to join or not. Such info are about one of these options:

• The group content
• The curriculum progress and what’s covered so far
• The teacher’s personality
• The activities inside that they can do inside this group
• The students who are already members in the group
• Next session’s appointment, and available recent sessions

After joining a group

The students either want to interact with the teacher and other students or both. So, we focused on designing interactive features that enable students to:

• See the teacher posts (announcements) and differentiate them from students posts
• Ask questions in a separate place and receive answers to these questions
• Get to know the progress of the course in the group
• See the organized, and divided subjects of the curriculum which contains chapters and lessons & easily find the content below each lesson

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1) Non-member view

The goal here is allow the students to see some of the benefits of being a member in the group to take the right action and join the group based on info they see about the teacher and the content inside.

So, what did we add in the group redesign (non-member view)?

• Promo video‍

It’s 2 mins video made by the teacher to describe the group and what the students will study inside. This allows the students to listen and see the teacher and get to decide if this is the best group and teacher for them or not.
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• About Teacher

This is the perfect space for the teacher to show off, get a high recommendation rate, add how many students learn from him, and highlight his characteristics based on students reviews.
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• Curriculum

Now the students can view the course content, the progress till now, and when it started.
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• Activities

Students can see if this group is active or not through showing how many questions are asked, and how many students are competing together.
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• Questions Quality

Here the students see the asked questions by students and answers.

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Changing color for the header based on the subject of the group

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2) Member view

Based on the student’s intent for joining the group, the expectations and goals definitely will change and increase after being a member.

So, what did we add in the group redesign (member view)?

We split the group into two tabs: Feed and Learn

The Feed tab:

This tab is for interactions and activities.  
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• Questions

Students now are able to ask a question and see all students’ questions.
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• What’s Happening Today

A brand new addition to the interface is the live track for the activities as: competitions, studying, and questions.
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• Teacher’s Posts

All announcements from the teacher now are in a separate section. This is a special place to get the latest posts and updates from the teacher.
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• Up next session

Showing the upcoming schedule for sessions.
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• Posts

It’s not a new section, but we separated between the friendly posts from the educational questions.

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The Learn tab:

This tab is for browsing the educational materials that are finished or scheduled by the teacher.

The teacher creates the curriculum then adds the chapters and inside each chapter he adds a set of lessons. Each lesson has: scheduled sessions, recorded sessions, attached files, assignments, and questions related to a specific lesson.

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This project is a long term project. New features will be added based on the variables and results.

Success metrics:

• No. of enrolled groups by the student.
• Adoption rate for activities as competition.
• Participation rate in interactive features as questions ie: who ask questions and who answer on them.
• Availability of the content and curriculum

We did A/B Testing on the default tab (Feed or Learn) to observe which is better in achieving these success metrics.

Usability Testing Results (Done by UX researcher):

• +90% successful rate for the usability testing tasks
• Some components were not noticed clearly because of the long page scrolling

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Thanks for reaching this point, I really appreciate it! I would like to hear a feedback from you

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Made with love with Noonacademy awesome team

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