Unacademy: Idea, Design, and way ahead
Do not have the money to go out, live in a different place, sit calmly in the comfort of home, and have hopes for achieving your dream? Even though you got one idealistic dream for you, can you imagine the hassle in managing classes, school or colleges or job and family responsibilities and the huge money and most of all the energy to thrive in?
Need
This tragic outbreak of the coronavirus shook up the education sector, and this fear resonated across the education sector globally. Several arguments are associated with e-learning. Accessibility, affordability, flexibility, learning pedagogy, life-long learning, and policy are some of the arguments related to online pedagogy. It is considered to be a relatively cheaper mode of education in terms of the lower cost of transportation, accommodation, and the overall cost of institution-based learning.
Scope
We are aware of the face-to-face education system of India which existed pre-corona, it was important to discuss how combining face-to-face lectures with technology gives rise to blended learning and flipped classrooms. This type of learning environment can increase the learning potential of the students.
Why Unacademy?
Particularly Unacademy is chosen as it is a traditional Indian teaching style with blackboard just available for everyone and everywhere. The rising popularity of it was another aspect to understand how it is better than its counterpart.
- They understood the growing popularity of the platform, the team was quick enough to bring more educators on board as collaborators with an exclusive app meant for educators.
- Now it was easy for every educator to create their content and put it online for the students to view it. These educators have acted as the influencers and marketers for the company. By bringing in educators as collaborators, Unacademy killed multiple birds with a single stone.
- They realized it’s tough to travel to places to learn and many times due to this, a major sector gets left behind.
Point of focus
Part 1 of the multi-part series on the design of Unacademy, revolves around its current design: what’s great with it and what’s lacking, and how something out of the box can add to the user experience.
What connects with the users?
Education is the instant perception of a person’s capabilities and one enlightening thought can transform your life, well it seems that Unacademy has absolute command on it in India. Considering the two successful competitors, Byju’s and Vedantu, Unacademy tops the charts when it comes to competitive preparation. Why?
Answering it from the point of the design, if we could say it in one sentence, it will be “Unacademy knows exactly what the audience wants and brings them what they require”. User Experience is what makes the app from the development stage to one of the highest downloaded apps in the education domain with 1 Cr+ download and 7 Lac+ reviews with the most positive ratings and recommendations.
Affordability
Unacademy introduced live and unlimited views of recorded classes on multiple platforms besides its own like Youtube which replaced with only three times views(which is more than enough but unlimited adds the cherry to the cake). The feature allows for the ‘free unlimited demo classes’ factor to seep into the world of coaching where the offline centers used to play a game with an average of 3 free classes.
Doubt solving
Online aspirants have expressed apprehension over the lack of physical contact can lead to doubts remaining unsolved with Unacademy tackled with the question tab.
Reconnecting
Unacademy introduced coins for daily learning and maintaining a streak that can give discounts and which was initially a feature for social media to make sure users turn in once every day. They recently introduced Combat which seems totally a game where the aspirant has to answer a question in 1 min, seems to be pretty interesting.
After using Unacademy for a year, I have realized even if I am having an extremely busy day, I don’t want to break my streak so I will turn up once. Since the minimum time to maintain a streak keeps increasing, you are gifted coins which also increase in a fixed period of time, makes learning fun and interesting.
It allows for a trial of courses such as classes, guidance sessions, and test series before purchase. Customers can opt to do so from the comfort of their homes, offices, or any other location of their choice. This feature will allow for high-value aspirations to be fulfilled online and reduces the amount and enhance the experience to a large extent.
“Discount with coins”
10% off on using credit coins for purchase. It is a kind of loyalty program to your own dream and aspirations which is open to registered users on Unacademy. There is no membership fee to participate in this coin collecting loyalty program. All you need to do is visit Unacademy daily and learn, longer is your streak more get trapped in your dreams, and return to buy Unacademy Plus. Win exciting points daily with a free learning experience, what could be more fun is attempting quizzes daily to boost up your coin game. The strategy used to market their brand is motivation and encouragement to the users. With coupons, offers, and high discounts, collecting coins and free learning simultaneously is amazing. These points can be redeemed for a world of benefits in your dreams as 10% off any courses regardless of where you earned the coins, easy access to the classroom & exclusive access to Master sessions on your goal by the achievers master educators.
Viola! you are given a discount for using the resources for free, given a simple bonus, they have high user retention too. This enables users to save money without cutting the corners.
“Legends on Unacademy”
Unacademy has now come up with a discussion with legends where you can send them instant messages to which they will respond, it seems fun. Watching your favorite celebrity interacting with you and if they by chance answer your question, pulls you together even if you are struggling to learn and spread the joy of being special. It wasn’t very common for the celebrities to discuss their personal life experience with aspirants and share their stories of being aspirants interactively. You can watch this with ease from both the mobile app and the website without even having a Plus subscription. Unacademy has turned the “best of both worlds at your footstep” into reality.
I remember a line from Dr. Kiran Bedi’s lesson on Legends with Unacademy, where she said, “It all starts with you. When it comes to handling crisis, when it comes to chasing dreams, when it comes to putting your thoughts into motion — everything starts with you!”
“Separate educator app and learner app”
No hassle in logging in, no extra options to choose the login, making the design quick and easy. You can create your profile in the app and be part of the learning wherein you can post choose educators, view their courses, select test, and quiz, and learn. This will help with easy discovery and no extra buttons on the login page when the interior is going to be totally different.
“Easy payments”
Ever thought of paying in cash for an online digital product service?
Even colleges don’t accept it, but Unacademy arrived with innovation in the arena too. Unacademy has developed itself as one of the most reliable and trustworthy platforms to spend your time and money on when seriously trying to learn and at a very low cost than offline counterparts. The services are satisfying too and I am telling with an experience of 1 year and research of about 80 people using Unacademy. You Just need to add your goal, subscribe for plus, and pay for your order with the secure portal. You can pay via Cash, credit/debit card, net banking, Wallets, and EMI.
Winding Up
Unacademy, one of the most popular e-learning sites has swayed its way through the tough race battling the competitor brands and creating a huge business in competitive exams especially. We may have different applications on the phone to scroll but the wish to explore the learning, takes us to Unacademy. Along with mainstream education, one of the biggest revenue eaters in the country is the parallel education system which has been very conveniently named the Coaching sector. There is a huge number of coaching classes helping the students to learn the concepts they have learned in schools and revise for their exams. There are areas which have developed purely due to this coaching mania (Kota, Rajendra Nagar, these places are synonyms to the coaching center and exam preparation).
The ed-tech industry grows at a rate we can never imagine. Stable brands with launched new ones, and the struggling ones, all competing together.
I love this project because I have been studying at Unacademy since Apr 2020, I chose it as part of my software engineering and Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), but even after the semester ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and being a design aspirant thought of changing this.
Hoping for someone at Unacademy HQ, Unacademy.in Blog, Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hardik Pandya reads this, and post their review in the comments.
Besides if you have reached till here please do let me know about your opinions in the comments or connect with me through Portfolio Dribbble Behance LinkedIn
