Creating a no-frills application to stay on top of school (BDO Entrepreneurship Award Recipient)

Time + Duration
December 2020
2 weeks
Roles
Interface Design
Business Strategy
Kind
Design and Business Proposal

Overview

Done is a desktop and mobile friendly no-frills application for university students to stay on top of their assignments. This nomination package design proposal won the Simon Fraser University SIAT BDO Entrepreneurship Award, the criteria being an outline of the project plan, its business potential and a faculty member recommendation.

Context

In a matter of just a few months of the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic, COVID-19 restriction guidelines enforced school closures across Canada, giving instructors and students no choice but to turn to remote learning in these unprecedented times. While remote learning is not here to stay forever, this critical period would likely leave lasting impact on education becoming increasingly digitized.

Issue

One significant pain point highlighted in an article detailing the anecdotal experiences of university students attending school remotely was the lack of a centralized platform for viewing, completing and submitting assignments. There are far too many selections of platforms for universities to choose from: Quercus, Canvas, Zoom, and etc. Many of these management platforms are often outdated, and incompatible with specific devices, and are usually deployed as web applications which do not have the same user-friendly qualities as that of a natively developed cross-platform application.

For instance, communication between instructors and students is often a frustrating experience when you account for multiple e-learning platforms and varying technological proficiency across individuals. There is no reason that students should have an easier time getting around social media, while being subjected to confusing user patterns on systems that are supposed to be conducive for learning.

Solution

Done is a desktop and mobile friendly application that eliminates the frustration of accessing assignment details from the already stressful activity of completing one. This app enables students to view their assignment breakdown according to fields pre-assigned by their instructors through an application with minimal information clutter and a modern, sleek interface. Gone are the days where assignment instructions, rubric guidelines and resources are hastily written on a single page site, or even worse, across multiple platforms.

Features

Floating Widgets
The main page (the user’s dashboard) is a visualisation of the user’s ongoing submissions. Indicated by size, these colourful assignment widgets are sorted according to how soon an assignment is due.

Categorization of Components
Upon selecting a widget, the user is taken to a more refined breakdown of an assignment sorted according to the information the instructor is willing to impart. Generally, these categories would fall under requirements, rubric and resources.

Check Progress
Users can also choose to track their progress by marking off contents under requirements, which is particularly useful in submissions with multiple deliverables. Their progress would then be displayed as a progress bar on the main dashboard. Finally, each assignment would have a dedicated forum for discussions, queries and announcements

Integrate with existing platforms
Through the API (application programming interface) from current educational management platforms such as Canvas or Blackboard, Done can grab typical sets of data such as assignment information, submission rubric and assignment discussions and display this information through the Done app. However, instructors can also choose to deploy assignments through the Done system itself with some training. This would encourage them to use the suggested fields tethered to each assignment, making assignment expectations transparent across instructors and students.

First Iteration

My key objectives application's user interface were
  • Show instead of look: Immediately become informed of upcoming assignments
  • Simplicity: Do not overwhelm users with content
  • Reduce anxiety around assignments: Entice users to interact with their assignments in a playful way

Business Potential

Done is a SaaS product (Software as Service), a cloud-hosted software application with the specific needs of students in mind. The SaaS model ensures a reliable revenue stream through monthly, quarterly or annual user subscriptions and is easily scalable in the long run since a single version can support a large number of customers. SaaS products have grown to be more ubiquitous than ever with the transition to working from home, making it a popular method for companies all over the globe to offload management operations. As a matter of fact, the market overall is projected to reach a whopping $623 billion by 2023, with its annual growth rate at a whooping 18% . While many SaaS products are exploding in popularity during the pandemic (e.g. Zoom, Slack, MailChimp, etc.), they are predominantly tailored towards businesses. A missing market that could likewise benefit from SaaS is education. In the United States alone, total revenues at degree-granting postsecondary institutions between 2017 to 2018 amounted to $671 billion. , with enrollment continuing to steadily increase every year. Like businesses, universities have high-order operations, magnitudes of data to manage and have a need for technology-based solutions to streamline multiple processes.

With many schools going remote and learning to incorporate technology into traditional instruction, we can expect the demand for technologies optimised for learning to continue to grow, rendering education an attractive industry to market Done to. While many SaaS applications (such as Slack and Asana) offer an education plan for schools to use their product, these SaaS products are originally designed for a corporate clientele with little to no changes in function or design across different subscription options. A centralised and targeted platform targeting student needs (completing assignments, understanding course material regardless of in-person or online instruction, etc) would therefore eventually outperform the current applications used. This is because Done is incentivised to include more features specialised for education that other SaaS softwares with a different user base would likely not prioritise as much.

Through an annual, bi-annual or monthly subscription, educational institutions can subscribe to a Done premium plan, offering access to all their students and instructors at a competitive price.