Jasjeet Plaha | Designer

Leaderboard Experience

Newton School | October 2022

Newton School is an online ed-tech platform that sells coding courses. It mainly served users who were working in other fields and wanted to transition into tech.

My contribution

In this project's context, I was assigned to revamp the existing leaderboard— which was just a list of students ranked along with their scores. There were many issues in there, but before that let me give an idea of how the course was structured and orchestrated.

About the product

Any course (full-stack development or data science) was divided into major sections— what we called "modules".

These modules contains live classes, assignments, and learning materials.
Each assignment would have 2-5 coding questions.
Apart from this, we had live contests and an Arena feature with more questions or the student to solve.
The course generally lasted 8-10 months or even longer— depending on the time it took for a student to get hired.

Problem Breakdown

The overarching issue we were solving in the company was making the course product-driven rather than being driven by an ops team. Ensuring that students attended lectures and practiced coding questions involved:

Course companions from our Ops team to nudge them every once in a while, and
Student’s own motivation to do these questions.

Leaderboard was one way to make this process to be product driven rather than being operations driven.

Understanding the user

The overarching issue we were solving in the company was making the course product-driven rather than being driven by an ops team.

Ensuring that students attended lectures and practiced coding questions involved:

Course companions from our Ops team to nudge them every once in a while, and
Student’s own motivation to do these questions.

Leaderboard was one way to make this process to be product driven rather than being operations driven.

Feature Goal and key decisions

To summarise, we focused on solving these 2 challenges with the new leaderboard:

Increase students' awareness on where they stand in the batch by giving them live rank changes.
Give them proper ways on the product that allows them to rank up by solving more questions.

There were a few more product decisions taken:

Creating a monthly leaderboard along with an all-time leaderboard: allowing everyone a chance to come on top once during the course.
Sharing major rank changes on the product and across other channels (such as de-ranking from Top 10 or making it there)
Creating a way by design that champions the top 3 rankers of the batch.
Lock the leaderboard at the start of the batch: this would help create some sort of motivation for students from the beginning itself.

Outcome

For the logo, I fiddled with the ✦ symbol, which was seemingly becoming more acceptable as a universal symbol for AI. Apart from this our core visuals included Neo, the AI mascot and elements like spacecrafts, isometric structures, and line diagrams. Supporting Illustration Elements included backdrops like terrain grids and spotlights to give these core elements more meaning and finish.