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THE APPROACH

THE RESULTS

UX RESEARCH

STRATEGY

STORYTELLING

THE CHALLENGE

How might we help students be efficient by giving them the fastest
and easiest path to achieving test outcomes?

Students were looking for personalized recommendations where Kaplan will identify their weaknesses and based on that would recommend what they need to do in order to improve their weakest areas. We also heard from PPI & MCAT students that it would be interested to compare their previous practice exams/tests with their recent one and see if Kaplan could predict future exam scores based on how they scored previously.

We want to make sure that we fully understand our end goal in terms of
performance based recommendations, so that we can make scoping and
release decisions that move us in the direction of that goal. We also want to
make sure that our decisions are based on Learning Experience best
practices and input and that what we build will meet the needs of the
majority of our business use cases.

Research Goals

Participants

Methodology

Things we discovered

After the research with students and internal stakeholders, I identified the following insights.

Recommendation based on performance

• To students recommendations should be made based on their performance (weak areas). Internal business stakeholders have also identified that recommendations should be based on students' performance.

Optimal vs priority recommendations

• Some students think of recommendations as optional resources whereas others think of them as prioritized resources.
• Internal business stakeholders want the recommendations to be optional for students and not the priority allowing to turn on & off them as needed.

Negative messages notifications

• Students don't like messaging saying that they're behind & they want to know why they're being prompted to push test date back.

Different types of recommended resources

• Students & internal stakeholders want to see variety of recommended resources suggested e.g. live classes + workshops, videos, flashcards, Qbank, readings.

Recommendations on the calendar

• Majority of students want to see recommendations on their Calendar, some want to see them in a form of notifications or a banner. Some business stakeholders expect the recommendations to show on the Calendar but highlighted in a different color to distinguish recommended materials from non-recommended. Other stakeholders expect to see recommendations on a separate page.

Study Timeline

• Students don't expect recommendations to impact their study timeline. In fact, they would prefer if it didn't.

Reasoning behind recommendations

• Some students want to see a short explanation of why certain resources are recommended for them, others don't expect seeing reasoning behind recommendations because they trust Kaplan.

Recommendations for full set of study products

• Business stakeholders expect the recommendations to be enabled to all the products which provide full set of study products instead of just the Qbank as an example with the ability to turn on/off.

Dynamic Calendar

• Students would be open to recommendations assigned to them by default. In our prior research with LSAT & GRE students we also found out that they preferred dynamic study plan. However, during the interviews students did mentioned that they want to see recommendations on their Calendar but distinguish them by highlighting them or in a form of notification or a banner.
• On the other hand, business stakeholders don’t want to prioritize recommendations but rather keep them optional.

UR Recommendations