Chatterbug Lessons
E-Learning
Role
As Design Lead, I improved existing features of Chatterbug Lessons, which helps users learn languages from real people, 1:1
Responsibility
Interaction design, Animation, Information architecture, Onboarding, Payments
Summary
Chatterbug Lessons is an online web application focused on 1:1 language tutoring. Think of it as an online language school but without the group classes. The curriculum is fully integrated along with study activities like flashcards, grammar concepts, writing, video and audio practice. It's a complete language learning system, all in one place created by the original founders of GitHub.
Courses Wireframe
My role as Design lead along with the rest of the design team including Amy Brumet (now lead at Whimsical) and CPO Tom Preston-Werner was to help refocus the app toward the DACH region (Deutschland, Austria and Switzerland). After looking into demographic data and conducting various user interviews we ascertained that the level of language learning in this area was much higher than those of most English speaking countries.
Upcoming Live Lesson
With this in mind, we set about introducing C level (CEFR) content to the lesson product as well as redesigning how to discover this content via the courses tab. The product at the time only supported CEFR levels up to B2, which from our research was a far lower level needed for this target audience.
My Courses with access to C Level content
Along with the redesigned interface for C Level discovery, we also upgraded the payments flow so that it was fully responsive and would be available with a new marketing campaign in the DACH region.
New Payments & Subscriptions
Mobile - Courses, Home & Course Detail
Discover Tutors - New feature proposal
Learnings
It's critical for startups to fully understand their target audience so that they can move towards product-market fit as quickly as possible. I learned that involving our users early on in the process helped us shape our improvements in the correct way, allowing our users to have the success they needed to learn a language properly.