Curious.com Learning Workouts

Getting people to learn something new every day.

Opportunity

Curious offered over 25,000 video lessons, countless puzzles, thousands of educational tidbits, and hundreds of podcasts. Unless they really went digging, most users were only exposed to a small portion of that phenomenal content.

So, we set a new goal: turn people into well-rounded learners. Help them dive deep on skills they were passionate about, but also encourage them to branch out and learn entirely new and useful things.

Design

Achieving that goal required many significant product evolutions. As the principal product designer, I helped identify, conceptualize, and deliver every feature.

I designed hundreds of things, but want to focus on three high-level items.

First, we created an onboarding that determined what people were interested in. This allowed us to personalize our app to fit the unique needs of each user.

Next, we encouraged diversification. We divided our content into skill categories and created a visual representation of what categories people were strong or weak in. At any time, a person could see how deep or diverse their learning was.

Finally, we told people exactly what to learn next. I developed a system - a 'workout' - that delivered a customized set of lessons daily. This system took away the burden of choice and helped people naturally strengthen the skills they needed.

Every feature required unique product design skills. I ran brainstorming sessions, reworked our information architecture, constructed detailed personas, drafted wireframes, conducted digital and in-person user tests, defined a service design strategy, crafted detailed visual designs, iterated, released, and refined.

Payoff

We made learning a daily for habit for tens of thousands of active users.

Our engagement numbers went up and up. People learned more - and more diversely - than ever before. This simple system gave new life to our existing content and scaled beautifully as we expanded our library.