Talent Coco👩🎓

Solve Education Inequality in India

Web · Education · Internship · Teamwork

Project Overview

Talent Coco (formally Taplingua) is an AI-based platform that provides communication assessments to students and job seekers in India. The goal is to help Indian students, particularly those from Tier 2 cities, who have strong technical talent, to enhance their English language and interview skills through AI feedback.

The product was initially a B2B platform offered to corporate partners like coding schools but is now rebranding to infiltrate B2C market. With a good amount of user feedback, the company was striving to create a one-stop shop for coding students.

My Contributions

I played a crucial role in setting design goals and key deliverables. I was also responsible for the design strategy, project planning, presentation, and stakeholder communication.

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Project Type

Part-Time

Solve Inequality in Education in India

Business Opportunity

Rebranding: B2B to B2C
Big market of students and good user feedback collaborating with coding schools and colleges
One-stop shop for code learning

Design Goal

Create engaging learning experience
Create a new product roadmap incorporating existing features

How can we help students from tier 2/3 cities improve their language skills for interviews?

⚠️ Current Problem

The existing AI interview assessment tool is not well designed. And it needed to be transformed in order to fit in the new brand — Talent Coco.

Two Major Challenges

❓ Challenge #1: Complex Scope with Time Constrain

Rebranding: nothing defined yet, no priorities identified
Tight timeline

🤩 Solution #1: Time-Efficient Plan and Stakeholder Alignment

We took two steps:

Step 1: Project Plan.

To set expectations and guide our work, it was critical to establish a project plan that would help us estimate how far we could get within the 6-week timeframe. Equally important was the need to clearly communicate this plan with the stakeholders to ensure everyone was on the same page.

Step 2: Identifying Priorities.

Based on our initial conversations and discussions, we recognized that two priorities stood out as most important for the project:

The complete structure(roadmap) of the final product, that being the interview assessment module incorporated with the code learning module, with a strong motivation mechanism (such as gamification) to encourage students learning.
The current AI assessment module needed to be redesigned to improve satisfaction.

❓ Challenge #2: Limited Access to Target Audience

Obtaining direct access to the target audience proved to be a challenge. Despite our best efforts to make connections, we were unable to secure the necessary access within our tight schedule.

🤩 Solution #2: Supplement Research — Competitive Analysis and Secondary Research

I proposed and got approval with following supplement researches:

Competitive Analysis
Secondary Research — Gamification

And the project plan was updated accordingly:

The Master Guide:
Complete MVP through Gamification

While conducting our competitive analysis, we studied three popular coding boot camps: Hacker Earth, Hack Reactor, and AttainU. We analyzed their tools, read reviews written by students, and obtained valuable insights into student preferences and requirements.

💡Competitive Analysis Insights

👍 Strengths

Mock interview opportunities
Visually appealing progress tracking and statistics
Encouragement for participating in hackathons, programming challenges, and coding competitions

👎 Weaknesses

Limited student support reported
Isolation during the learning process
Not ideal for beginners

I also conducted a secondary research around habit-forming and gamification.

💡 Secondary Research on Gamification Insights

Helpful features:

A system to track progress and achievements
Personalized and immediate feedback mechanisms
A ranking and badge system to recognize student progress and success

The complete MVP included 6 modules that integrate the results of our research and stakeholder meetings. In addition, an onboarding process was included for first-time users to facilitate a seamless user experience.

The MVP included two critical components, the code learning module and technical interview module, as per the company's core need. The community module would provide interaction, emotional support and help for students, making them less lonely during the learning journey. The raking system along with the badge system would provide motivation for students. And the progress/achievement/certification system would give students a clear view of their progress and a sense of accomplishment.

We were confident that the combination of these motivation features will enhance the students' learning experience and help them achieve their goals.

Figuring Out What is Working/Not Working on the Current AI Feedback Module

As planned, at the same time, we carried out usability testing with 8 participants. To make it fast, the participants are mostly our friends and colleagues.

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Questions asked:

Tell me about what you see on the interview assessment page?
Please complete an interview assessment.
Can you share your thoughts on the scores and AI feedback you received?
Can you provide feedback on the AI analysis certificate?

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💡 Actionalble Insights from 1st Usability Testing

Make it able to incorporate more interview questions
Give user more control of the interview process (skip, done, exit)
Ask for camera and mic permission
Add onboarding tutorial and guidance
Need score list with details (date, score)
Make dashboard with infograph of progress

Affinity Map Helped Us Sythesize Results

Redesigning the Existing AI Interview Feedback Module

Since we already had the big picture of the whole product, we can move down along the hierachy to focus on the narrower scope. We refined the user flow of the AI Interview Assessment module based on feedback from stakeholders and insights from usability testing, and based on the need of our persona, Anand.

We took two round of usability testing with the flow, 8 person each round, plus design audit and stakeholder feedbacks. The second round of usability testing produced positive results. The users were able to complete most of the tasks themselves

💡 Insights and Improvements from 2nd Usability Testing

Success:

‍60% increase in task completion rate 🎉

Issue	Recommendation
There is no note for different categories of progress on the dashboard.	Add a legend for the progress bar.
Checking both boxes for camera and mic and then clicking on allow for permission is too much effort so some users tend to skip it.	Make the checkboxes checked by default.
Users don’t realize the eye icon is for previewing questions immediately.	Spell out “Preview” or don’t hide questions.
Users are looking for the “stop recording” button when they are asked to end the question early. And they are confused about “skip” and “next question”	Change “skip” to “skip the current question” Add a “stop recording” when users are recording answers while keeping “next question” grayed out. After users click “stop recording”, make the “next question” button available.
Users are not aware that there will be preparation time for questions.	Add preparation time to the interview assessment instruction page Next step recommendation: create a short onboarding tutorial about interview assessment when users are taking it for the first time
Not a lot of users noticed the badges	Add more badges and apply the badge system throughout the course

Dashboard Exploration and Design

We used the results from the second round of usability testing to make improvements to the product and fix any issues. The resulting high-fidelity dashboard was created using the established design system.

The final dashboard was improved from the wireframe based on the feedbacks from the final delivery meeting. The key call-to-actions from rating, progress, and ranking were made more prominent and the navigation menu was re-oriented to offer easier navigation for users.

Conclusion

🎉 Feedback and Results

“I love the insights you provided!”

Significant 60% raise of task completion rate
Increased user engagement through gamification: CTAs to engage users, instant feedback, etc.
Clear product roadmap for future design

What I Learned

Constrains are always there. Designers need to be creative.
See ambiguity from a different perspective would help. View it as opportunities and possibilities!
I am great at leading and pushing projects forward. I was able to set clear design objectives to everyone with all of them on-baord and I was able to strategize the communication with stakeholders to drive alignment.

If We Had More Time...

Interview with real users to gain first-hand information.

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