Conjuguemos

Introduction

Conjuguemos is the language learning platform that started working in 2000. This site has about 3.5 million registered users and is used by hundreds of thousands of students a day to learn verbs. It is a community-sourced site. Teachers around the country and world created almost all the activities. The idea behind the project was to move teaching verb conjugations from teachers and leave it to the software. Teachers would do the fun part - conversational knowledge.

Team & Task

Until 2018, the system looked very old and had only the tiny fraction of features it now has. When the redesign began (early 2018), there was a small team of 5 (front-end dev, backend dev, QA, designer, and owner). After two months, I've joined as a replacement for a designer since he moved away. My job was to finish the last 90% of the project using a style guide that has been already made.

Process

There are many sides to this project user-wise. The users of this platform are Students, Teachers, and Educational Institutions. Mixing and satisfying everyone's needs is a tough job.

Onboarding

Onboarding had a bit different flows to fulfill the needs of all different types of accounts.
Here is a sneak peek of Institutional onboarding flow.

Teacher Account

Teachers are arrangers of almost everything in this system. They're adding new tests and games. Creating new classrooms, adding students to them, and grading their work. They need to have a history of everything going on with their students. Graphical showoff of their student's progress and compare system between some classrooms and students were a must.

Student Admin

When students make their accounts, they need to join the right school and classroom. From the admin panel, they can see the previous tests with results as well as the upcoming tests. Some work and play Activities are also available to them to try them out and practice. We implemented some kind of trophy gamification of student's profiles where they get a certain amount of points after every test, which then levels them up, etc.

School Admin

Schools need to pay for each seat their teachers are taking as well as for an annual institutional subscription. They can manage lists of their teachers, upgrade them to the premium ones. It will unlock them more features such as unlimited access to all public activities, games, and printables, endless activities that they can create, and unlimited storage for them to store grades and test results.

Game Activities

This is a fun corner. Graded practices are conjugating tasks that can be arranged and set up by teachers for a specific class. Flashcards are more of a translatory test where you say if you do or don't know a particular word, etc. And Games are, just that, Games. There are multiplayer and single-player games such as Verb Battleship, Crosswords, WordSearch, Frogjugator, and many more. Some of them meant to be played live in class.

Outcomes & Results

Given the time difference with the client, communication was crucial. You can never communicate enough. I am very grateful because I had a very creative client with a precise vision. Sometimes when I was designing, and we were on a tight deadline, I tried to come up with solutions easy for development that wouldn't affect user experience much but would benefit the whole team with finishing the work on time and pushing the feature to our users. I have learned to value team-play and work on something together to achieve the best possible outcome.