Improving and launching 2nd version of an empathy app

Background:

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In November 2023 I became the Product Manager of the web app “A question of Empathy” – a digital platform for teachers to educate classroom students on empathy via videos and digital exercises.

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VeAhavta’s goal is to spread awareness and educating people about empathy and emotional intelligence and works with many educational institutions.  They tackle this universal and close to home problem in a myriad of ways-a prominent one being educating youth on empathy.

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The app allowed teachers to present empathy lectures to their students, allow each classes students to have a personal video lesson on empathy with follow up digital exercises, and allow teachers to track their classes’ progress.

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The customers: Israeli Grade Schools

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End users: 1st-2nd grade teachers and their students.

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North Star Metric: how many schools are delivering weekly empathy lectures on a constant basis.

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Guardrails: How many schools are skipping through lectures, how many lectures are being skipped, how many schools are missing two lectures in a row.

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My responsibilities: UX research, wireframing, feature specification and PRDs, engineer standups, QA, documentation and user guides, reports with executives.

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TL;DR: With a tight budget, in 2 months I improved 7 core app features, added all desired features on the roadmap, and enhanced the user journey-taking into account all paths the user could take at any given point, and eliminated technical roadblocks. Successfully launched app's second version.

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Prior to my involvement:

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1.  Teachers could have several lectures open at once, and could get forget which class they were currently on.

2. Teachers weren’t clear on which buttons needed to be clicked

3. Reports were not in app, required a download, and the data was hard to follow.

4. Reporting didn’t include stats that would help teachers understand how their students were progressing.

5. Admins weren’t sure how to add a new class to the app

6. Admins didn’t know how to open the student’s environment

7. Access to the app was only possible via disconkey.

 

After my involvement

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1. Improved the user experience to be error free and dummy proof: Teachers had to follow a linear program-1 lecture at a time, but had the option to skip a lecture and give us feedback on why the felt it wasn’t appropriate. If a teacher accidently ended a class, a pop up jumped out asking if they were sure they wanted to.

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2. Edited the app’s copy to ensure it was appropriate for the for the target audience. The teachers were very non-technical and were already apprehensive about using a digital solution. This meant the copy on buttons to progress had to be significantly different than for a regular user-it was more on the nose. Instead of “End class”, I changed the button to “Click here to end the class”

 

3. Differentiated 2 types of lectures: 1 quarterly lecture where each student watched the same video and answered a personal quiz, and a bi-weekly class where the teacher lectured to the whole class and discussed a specific topic of empathy.

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4. Launched a dashboard with filters displaying the progression of each teacher’s class’s levels of empathy throughout the program grouped by empathetic categories, as well as a breakdown of how many lectures (of both types) had been completed.

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5. All users: Admins, teachers and students had a user guide built for them and written at their level of understanding-in text and video format-of how to use the platform.

 

6. The app was made remotely accessible to all of VeAhavta’s customers.

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​Results

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• Successfully launched app’s 2nd version.

• Allowed more schools to access the platform at scale

• Executive was so impressed with results he secured another budget to implement a more complex iteration of the product.

• Since VeAhavta is a non profit, I had to be even more resourceful than usual. The majority of the budget covered development, the only ongoing subscription purchase was vimeo for hosting the videos, which allows us to store minimum data on the cloud framework Firebase, which we didn’t need to pay for at all.

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