Educational App: Baicizhan

• Company: Chengdu Chaoyouai Education Co., Ltd.

• Time Period: 05. 2012 - 11. 2013

• Role: Content lead & Learning designer

• Responsibility: Establish and train content team / Create and supervise instructional design specifications / Assist in user research and usability test

Background

In China, millions of students have difficulties in acquiring English vocabularies because the task itself is dull and method of learning isn't efficient. I'm both the witnesses and the victim of this inefficient learning process. Seeing the many students still struggling with the same problem, our team decided to create a playful and effective solution to help them out.

After several iterations, our MVP was proved successfully in engaging users. Therefore we decided to speed up content production to cover a wider range of vocabulary so as to meet the major needs of the learners.

Challenge

I was elected as a content manager and was responsible for the learning content development (from design to production). For me, the challenges were:

1. How to measure users' preference in a cost-effective way?

2. How to speed up the content production and constant improvement?

3. How to build a skilled content team to produce high-quality content?

Solution

Challenge 1 and 2 were solved by a strategy named Lean Content Development.

My supervisors Dan and I collaborated to develop the strategy by applying the Lean Startup Methodology (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The strategy of Lean Content Development

Challenge 3 was solved by building and training a multinational outsourcing team.

In order to screen out suitable candidates, I tested different outsourcing platforms and recruitment channels. Within two months, I managed to build an outsourcing team with different roles, such as voice actors, copywriters and translators.

I believe that a successful manager is also a good coach, therefore, I developed The Five Principle For Training (Figure 2 ) based on great coaches' philosophy and implemented them into my work. With effective guidance and encouraging environment, the outsourcing team members were able to develop their skills quickly and completed the massive content production.

Figure 2. The five principles for training

Results

With the solutions mentioned above, the content team became skilled in producing high-quality content efficiently (Figure 3). This also helped our app Baicizhan (Figure 4) to dominate the Chinese market. This app has been the No.1 brand in the field of English vocabulary learning since 2012 in China.

Figure 3. Highlights of this project

Figure 4. App Baicizhan

Wall of Gratitude

I would like to express my gratitude for the people involved in this project.

• My supervisor Dan Ouyang, who helped me grow both mentally and professionally. The role he played in my career was invaluable and I hope one day I will be able to exert such positive impact on others like him.

• Xuefei Chen, who gave me great technical support and advice on content production.

• All the members in Baicizhan and outsourcing team, who worked so hard to ensure the high quality of our product.

It was truly a pleasure working with all of you and thank you very much!