Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

I usually work with storytelling along with como other UX tools like Personas and  Scenarios; since one of my clients is an online University, I must deal with people from  different backgrounds: Peasants, seniors or people who dropped University a long time  ago.

Working with storytelling help me out to think more about their context, wondering  question such as how they use my application, when, what for, etcétera.

Since Storytelling is a tool that invite us to tell story through words or images, as a  University we can use that tool not only to deliver a better education itself, but also to  get a better picture of our students and their context.

Application

At the very beginning of this project, we couldn’t bring the product to the people in an  efficient way; our potencial customers hesitated about us (a new brand) and most of the  people we subscribed to the university drop the service in a short period of time.

The firs stage was to design the educational model, so we benchmark thousands of the  most popular education videos on the internet and we abstracted the narrative meta  structure they apply to generate an entertaining and meaningful educational experience.

By using this tool, we were also able to deliver a much better ad campaign with videos  and graphic materials which tell a story; we were able to connect to the audience by  recognizing their effort and all kind of challenge they have to deal in order to continue  with the university education: Combine work with studies, being a full-time housewife,  work as a farmer 18 hours a day; not having ultimate generation smartphones or having  bad internet service, etcétera.

We not only saw this new context as a chance to sell better the product, but also it  made us renew our education model and the platform user experience.

Insight & Approach

The wow effect or the big idea came out after few months: We as the manager team,  and the investors, saw not only an economic opportunity but also a social challenge:  they were people who were not able to get university education because their social and  economic context: They live far universities, they did not have access to technology and  they had to work more than 8 hours a day.

So, beside renew our pedagogic model and the user experience of our platform, and  besides improving our ad campaign, we decided to offer not only full scholarships, but  also give away ultimate generation smartphones and pay appropriate internet service.

