Using AI bots to enhance user engagement in BYJU’S classes
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With the on-set of AI in multiple domains, how can we leverage it in online classes to improve the experience, increase engagement and establish individual attention for the students?
In this article we’ll deep dive into how I along with the BYJU’S team designed an AI bot to improve the student’s in-class experience and help achieve business goals.
Problem Statement
BYJU’S classes currently operate using a single mode of guidance — the tutor, for students. Introducing a virtual assistant to assist each student during the class could greatly enhance the learning experience. This presents an opportunity to convert passive attendees into active learners and increase overall engagement in the class.
The question now is how and where to implement bots that can encourage users to interact with the platform.
My Responsibilities
Secondary Research, Ideation, Creating Framework, User Flows, Wireframing, UI Design, Prototyping
Collaborators
Fazal Thanveer (mentor), Dhaneesh Jameson (Supervision & feedback), Hridika Roy (Primary Research), Saideep Karipalli (Early concept), Shaheen Sheriff (Mascot Animation)
The Goals
- User goals — Enhance the experience by allowing them to interact with the bot
- Business goals — Increase engagement
- Product goals — Maintain the current UX by not let the bot be a distraction, also engaging more users without manual/human effort.
TLDR; ⚡ Project in a minute
As a Product Design Intern at BYJU’S my work revolved around designing interactive AI bots to increase user engagement for the students from Class 4–10, during their online classes experience. After understanding the problem space and the UX of bots, we ideated and designed a mascot-based bot called ‘Sparky’.
Sparky is a gender neutral shape shifter that primarily comes in 3 forms, each of these forms conveys a specific set of emotions which can be used according to the context. Sparky’s wide range of use cases fall into 3 categories; To drive connections, Act as a personal guide, Act as a teaching assistant.
Sparky along with its forms provides maximum flexibility as it can also be initialised as a chatbot in the in-class chat forum to help the students with doubts. Lastly, I documented a framework for Sparky’s use that will assist the team in exploring further bot use cases.
Initial Research
To understand the effectiveness of bots in education, I studied and deconstructed multiple existing bots. Apart from that I also read through existing research papers to understand the impact of the bots.
Understanding the users
The UX research team had previously performed an extensive study to understand the users. The team carried out multiple user interviews and pointed out the pain points via participatory observation.
Bot’s visual identity
The initial thoughts were to keep the mascot simple with minimal movements. Multiple shapes were sketched like a potato battery or brain, but it was decided to move ahead with the bulb as it resonated more in our context.
Forging the bot’s personality
After the visual identity was established, it was important for the bot to sound humane, have its own personality and a character description. To build its personality, I studied Myers-Briggs personality types and answered these 8 points to write a character description.
Who is this bot!?
Introducing Sparky!
Sparky is an in-house superhero with shape-shifting and vanishing powers. It is a gender-neutral with the sole aim of helping the students excel in their studies. Sparky has access to multiple things that the students do on the classes platform which enables it to help the students in every scenario.
Sparky’s forms
Sparky being a shape shifter, primarily comes in 3 forms. Each of these forms represent a set of similar emotions and can be used according to the use case.
Where can Sparky be used?
The entire online classes experience is divided into 3 phases; pre-class, in-class and post-class. According to that, I brainstormed on ideas that can be facilitated through Sparky.
These ideas were a mix of realistic and futuristic use cases, as the bounds of Sparky were still unknown and having futuristic use cases helped us test the bots hypothesis even better.
- Promoting Healthy Online Habits
- Kids spend a chunk of time online, sitting on their desks trying to focus. So Sparky here wants to add value by reminding them of the healthy habits that they should inculcate to have a better experience.
- It will first tell them about the importance of these healthy habits and then give them a checklist.
- This checklist is a reminder for the students and a way for Sparky to promote these healthy habits. The more items that are checked, Sparky can show a delightful expression to the students.
Recurrence of the use case
- Sparky can come in for this use case twice in a week so that the students get used to the idea, then Sparky can let them choose if they want to continue seeing these reminders.
2. Talk with Sparky
- Sparky can initiate one-on-one communication with the users. Sparky is a friend and have conversations with the users on any topic that Sparky initiates or the users bring up.
- Sparky here will initiate the conversation by introducing itself as their friend and taking the conversation forward depending on their responses.
3. Fun Facts
- Sparky can come in to give a one liner fun fact to the users. This fact needs to be loosely related to the subject that is going to be taught so as to keep it interesting.
- The idea here is to drive curiosity towards the subject by taking a non-boring way.
- Apart from that, it can also be a good conversation starter. Once Sparky tells the users the fun fact, it can take the conversation forward like the second use case.
4. Group Chat
- Since Sparky is capable of communicating one on one, the idea of Sparky initiating group chats can also be experimented
- Sparky here helps the students make friends and get to know their classmates
Edge case — What if no one joins the group chat?
- In this case, students are navigated to facilitate a one-on-one conversation with Sparky!
5. Sparky as a TA
- This use case is a system driven intervention. In a scenario where the users are displaying unnecessary moves, like repeated keyboard presses / out of context reaction presses etc, which are distracting the users from focusing on the class.
- Here Sparky can come in and in a friendly tone instruct the users to focus on the class and avoid these distractions
Learnings and Takeaways
- I explored areas and unconventional methods to take one step at a time to reach to the final solution. It was highly beneficial to deconstruct the process in tiny parts and work on them with utmost clarity, eventually to realise that I was painting a bigger picture.
- Communication and constant feedback is one of the most important ways to improve as a designer and as a working professional.
- Working in projects with constraints made me adept at making the most of the resources I have available. I also learned how to advocate for my design in large organisational structures.
That’s it folks!
Thank you for taking out time and reading this case study. I would love to hear so feel free to reach out LinkedIn or Twitter. If you’d like to checkout my other projects please visit — nishantpant.com.
