Qoria
Client Project
My Contributions:
User Research
Product Design
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Tools:
Figma
Trello
Maze
Stark
Timeline:
3 week sprint (2024)
Overview:
Qoria is a dance instruction and social platform app for students and teachers of all dance styles. Qoria’s goal is to connect students, teachers, and artists to share and learn dance techniques while providing a social community.
The company created a ground breaking teaching software that helps dance teachers give detailed and accurate feedback to students. They now need a way for teachers to access the platform and create courses so that they can begin connecting with dancers.
Jump to:
Research
Our Research objectives were to understand the friction points dance teachers have when making online class modules, and to learn what would motivate dance teachers to facilitate a community. We conducted user interviews on 6 dance teachers to gain insight into the dance teaching experience. We also performed a heuristic evaluation on the current wire frames of the app to determine any problems with the current designs.
Heuristic Evaluation
The evaluation helped us discover violations in three main areas:


Visibility of System Status​​
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No indicator of where the user is within the app
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Missing progress indicators for the user when creating courses
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No insights for user status to differentiate between student or teacher profile
User Control and Freedom
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Inconsistent navigation, no navigational tool bar to move freely throughout the app
Aesthetic & Minimalist Design
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Visually competing color palette that fails WCAG standards
User Quotes:
“I use video as a tool to share and catalogue my work”
“I believe that dance is about being part of a community”
“I make lesson plans if it fits the situation.”
After conducting our interviews, we created an affinity map and drew three key insights. The first is that lesson planning is different for each dance teacher. The second is that dance teachers use digital tools to accommodate their needs. The third insight is that videos are a key tool that dance teacher use to share their work.
Ideation
Drawing from our research and conversations with the Qoria founders, we identified key user and business needs. We realized users needed the capability to upload videos as part of their lessons and that the lesson structure needed to be adaptable to each teacher's unique style. Additionally, we understood Qoria's concern about providing teachers with enough guidance to assist them in course creation on the app. These objectives guided us in creating ideation questions and user flows that would inspire our designs.
How might we help the user feel confident in the lesson planning process?
This task flow summarizes the steps that the user would need to take to create and publish a course. Defining the actions helped us know what screens we would need to sketch.
After several rounds of sketching we narrowed down our ideas and started wireframing.
Design
We conducted a test to identify the usability successes and pain points of our designs, focusing on onboarding, navigation, and course creation features.
What did we learn from our usability test?
What went well:
Areas to explore:
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33% of users mistook explanatory copy as a text field.
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50% of users felt constrained when following the steps in the template. Users want to be able to select options in their own order.
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More than 60% of users were able to complete the course creation task using the template.
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Majority of users stated that they liked the idea of the course template to help them organize their lessons.
Adjustments we made:
The box around the “Course Template” description was removed so users wouldn’t confuse it as a text field.
An accordion style menu was created to allow for users to move freely throughout the template.
Final Prototype
Impact & Next Steps
We successfully addressed Qoria’s issue by providing instructors with access to the app. Our solution gives dance instructors the ability to interact by creating online courses.
If I were to continue this project, I would build the student view portion of the app so that students can interact with dance instructors and their courses.
I would also research and create designs for the payment portion of the app so teachers can interact with their earnings.
Reflection
On this project I was able to work with a real client to solve a business and user need. I learned how create a statement of work and gained experience collaborating with C suite members of Qoria. It was a great opportunity for me to find balance between addressing business and user needs.
Special thanks to Nolan Palmer, Ian O’Hara, Sara Korman & the Qoria team!