Starfish
Designing an Innovative Education Platform for Thai Teachers
Starfish's mission is to change the education system in Thailand by providing educators with modern, innovative teaching techniques designed to engage students in the classroom and get better results.
Overview
Starfish aims to transform the Thai education system by training teachers in the latest teaching techniques and methodologies. After conducting workshops in Bangkok, they realized that to scale the project, they needed to create an easy-to-use on-demand teacher training app.
Our solution
To understand Starfish's users, we held design thinking workshops for a group of educators. In these workshops, they expressed their needs and brainstormed ideas, features, and solutions, which we used to create web personas and a customer journey map. From there, we designed the information architecture and wireframes, and developed Starfish’s brand guidelines.
Conducted an In-depth research
to understand user behavior, needs and flows
Gamification of features
Gamified the app and added officially recognized certificates to promote long-term use
Transformative launch
Within 3 months, the app received 1.3 million page views
Our process
Workshops → Information architecture → Brand guidelines → High-fidelity concepts
We began the project by running workshops to understand the pain points of the app's intended users and see what they needed. After analyzing this data, we designed the information architecture and wireframes, developed brand guidelines, and designed high-fidelity concepts for the education platform.
Challenges we overcame
1. Understanding the Thai education system
Since Starfish exists within the Thai education ecosystem, we needed to learn about the bureaucracy of Thai schools. This was to help ensure that our solution would be realistic and useful for Thai teachers. Thus, we ran design workshops for Starfish’s staff and educators and ordinary K-12 teachers to understand their work flows, processes, and bureaucracy in Thai schools.
2. Determining the needs of K-12 teachers
We also conducted focus groups to get a deeper understanding of our target audience so we could give them the features they need most on the app. This happened in focus groups where we gathered participants' insights to discover their pain points and asked them to brainstorm ideas, features, and solutions for the platform. From there, we organized our findings in order of importance based on feedback.
3. Promoting user engagement on the app
To foster user engagement, we created a playful design to encourage teachers who were not tech-savvy to have fun on the platform. We also gamified the app to nudge users to continue making progress with it. And perhaps most importantly, teachers were also able to receive official certification from the Thai government for completing training on the app.
The social aspect of the app was also crucial to engaging teachers. One way that we made it interactive was to have teachers grade each other's work. This helped them not only interact with their colleagues but also reflect on their own work.
Our work on Starfish is ongoing, and we look forward to improving the app with each iteration.
