Bitlearns - Rethinking Education with AI

Rethinking the learning experience in schools in the age of AI

Ambition

How can we empower teachers to create engaging lessons efficiently in the age of AI?

Roles and Responsibilities

UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, User Interface Design

User Research: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Usability Testing

Product: Product Strategy, Feature Prioritization

Project Context

When: Sep 2023 - Present

Team size: 4 people

Timeline: 1 year

Tools used: Figma, Illustrator, Github

Too long to read?

Summary

Bitlearns has been one of the most extensive design projects I’ve undertaken. It’s a business initiative I started with three friends, where I am responsible for designing the entire platform and crafting the user experience for both teachers and students. Over the past year, I’ve conducted user research and interviews with multiple teachers and students to validate the problem, refine the solution, and test the platform. Their feedback has driven key decisions, including rethinking the user experience, prioritizing features, and, at times, scaling down to focus on what matters most.

Working in a fast-paced environment, I’ve had the opportunity to stay close to users, applying their feedback to continuously improve the platform. This project has involved creating wireframes, building the information architecture, developing multiple high-fidelity design versions, complete interactive prototypes, and a detailed design system. Given our small, agile team, I also work closely with developers—offering design reviews on new releases, discussing feature implementation, and ensuring best practices are followed for design system updates.

Timeline

This product is the result of a lot of team effort and this is a high-level overview of what we’ve worked in the past months. Currently we are starting to test the Beta with schools in Brazil and constantly improving the experience for teacher and students.

Starting point

The motivation for this project started from personal interests. I wanted to work on a product that improved the education in Brazil and was up to date with the latest technology updates and struggles in the education landscape. So we started with what we know:

Educators often have large class sizes to teach and limited resources to offer the appropriate support

User Research

To better understand the challenges and needs of educators, I conducted interviews with 6 educators, including teachers and school administrators, focusing on their experiences in the classroom, the tools they currently use, and the obstacles they face in providing education.

“It’s tough to spot where each student is struggling and then adapt to those individual needs, especially when you’re handling multiple classes. Creating personalized questions and content takes a lot of time.”

“Despite our best efforts, it’s a struggle to maintain student engagement, especially with traditional content delivery methods that don’t always resonate with the way students consume information outside of school.”

“AI can be a great resource for students, but it’s also hard for us as teachers to know how much they’re using it to do the work versus genuinely engaging with the material.”

Learnings

After analyzing all the notes from the interviews, I noticed three main topics brought up by the educators:

Goal

The user research helped us understand educators better, hearing from them what their needs and wishes really are. Based on that, we defined the goal we were working for:

How can we use AI to support teachers in creating engaging lessons and enhancing student engagement?

In other words, we wanted to design and develop a tool that helps teachers create Duolingo or Brilliant-like experiences while automating 90% of the process.

Wireframes

I started with paper wireframes to translate the ideas in my head and to discuss with the team the best direction for the product. This also helped with feature prioritization since in this stage we aimed for a MVP. After that, I moved to higher fidelity wireframes.

MVP Design

After the wireframes, I started designing an MVP to capture the initial structure and functionality of the platform. My goal was to validate the product concept with teachers before building a more complex interface and also to identify any user experience mistakes early.

In this stage, I focused on building the core flows—Courses, Classes, Lectures, and Lecture Creation—each designed to support teachers in organizing and creating, and delivering content effectively. The student interface was similar to these main areas but emphasized lesson completion rather than creation.

While the experience includes more screens and various design iterations, these are the core ones:

Classes allows teachers to create and manage groups of students to receive the same content

Courses act as the main place to organize all lectures on a specific subject (e.g., History)

In Lectures, teachers can view all the content they created for a course. For the card layout, I explored several options, and chose the one that best conveyed the idea of a journey

The Lecture Creation process requires title, description and leaning goals to create the lesson, which teachers can preview

This is the preview of the lesson. Teachers can review all the content generated before releasing it to students

This is the student’s experience with the lesson. As with other pages, the interface remains similar to the teacher’s

User Testing

After finishing the MVP design and development, we started a few sessions of user testing before spending too much time on the product. We needed feedback. I conducted 5 user testing sessions with teachers with three main goals guiding them:

Validate the Product

Determine the relevance and utility of the product as a whole, focusing on whether teachers see value in the current features

Assess User Experience

Evaluate how intuitive and user-friendly the interface is, focusing on how easily teachers can navigate the different journeys

Identify Additional Needs

Explore whether there are unmet needs that are not currently covered by the product

User Testing Learnings

User testing with teachers highlighted three main areas for improvement: simplifying the creation process, adding editing capabilities, and providing better insights from students.

Unclear Creation Flow

Teachers found the process of creating lectures confusing and didn’t understand the purpose of the lecture preview

Limited Editing Capabilities

Teachers expressed a strong need for more control over editing lecture content. They want to really own that final result

Insights on Student Needs

Teachers emphasized the importance of better understanding student performance and learning gaps

Overall, I learned that things lacked purpose. The features were not connecting well. I needed to reimagine the product to ensure that it was true to our ambition.

Design Refinement

Student experience

I incorporated interactive elements throughout the content, using the active recall method from learning science

I included a knowledge check at the end of each lecture, prompting students to explain what they learned. This uses the self-explanation method and helps provide learning insights to teachers

Lesson creation process

Divided the creation flow into sequential steps, offering a guided experience with instructions at each stage and a sense of progress

Offered AI suggestions for titles, descriptions, and goals, allowing teachers to quickly choose or customize while keeping the process efficient

Lesson personalization

I designed a way for teachers to edit, delete, and add additional content. Making the experience more personalized.

I introduced interactive components between the content to boost student engagement, with the option for teachers to create their own

Interactive components design

Student view of all the interactive components I designed for the teacher to include in the lessons

Lecture page

Courses and Classes pages

Classes

Enabled teachers to see all the classes created in their school to avoid duplication and make best use of students’ learning insights

Courses

Considered more designs for different cases, made design more consistent and rethought the filters to be aligned with the lectures

Communication and Progress

I needed to do constant design reviews and I learned to provide feedback in way that worked for the rest of the team.

I added detailed cards to our Github Project and complemented with screenshots with callouts and the correct designs for reference on Figma

Main Materials

I developed a lot of work for this project, so while I can’t cover everything in this case study, I will try to show a sneak peek of the main files in the Figma, showing a bit of the final designs, the design system and the interactive prototype settings. I hope you don’t get too dizzy! 😊

Final Designs

I designed all the screens for the teacher and student view. In the file, I divided the mocks by journey organized “linearly.” These journeys include signing up, creating a course, creating a class, creating a lesson, editing a lesson, among others.

Design System

A comprehensive brand guideline and design system, constantly updated, with all the main components and their variants, including context about their best use and prototype settings

Prototype

Fully interactive prototype of all the mocks to quickly gather user feedback, present demos and discuss the product with the team