Monthly Reading Challenge
The Newsela Monthly Reading Challenge is a gamified solution designed to empower students to become independent readers outside of their daily assignments on Newsela. This will allow students to collect rewards through exploring Newsela curated content.
Role Lead product designer
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Company Newsela
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Team 4 engineers, 1 PM, 1 researcher, 1 copywriter, 4 content specialists
The problem
Students are not motivated to read independently on Newsela.
Students have the most to gain from our platform and yet they don’t enjoy learning on our platform.
Why are we solving this?
We know the power of reading
Students who read outside of required work perform better academically.
Competitive advantage
Our competitors are not doing it so we will have the advantage
New approach to engagement
This will tell us if gamification will solve engagement issues.
Team purpose and approach
Historically, Newsela has prioritized the teacher’s experience. The thinking was that if teachers love the product, then they will advocate for admins to purchase/renew Newsela licenses.
However, we were ignoring the student as an advocate. The Student Engagement Experience team was created to solve this issue. A student-centric experience will transform students into our biggest advocates and drive teacher usage, leading to more admin sales.
THE HYPOTHESIS
If we create a student experience that empowers and incentivizes students to explore relevant content, then we will drive teacher use.
What do we know about students?
We have a legal restriction against testing with people under the age of 18. Therefore, I met with the research and consumer insights team to get a better understanding of students’ pain points.
They want games 🎲 🎮
The #1 search term from students is “games”. When students search for games on Newsela, instead of serving them games, we give them content ABOUT games which does not align with student expectations.
But wait…they DO read 📖 📖 📖
Students DO read on their own...just not on Newsela. We asked teachers what type of content students read outside of Newsela: Sports, sci-fi, anime, comics books, mystery, and wildlife to name a few.
They are bored 😴 😴 😴
Research has shown that students think Newsela is boring and they don’t enjoy reading on our platform. They read because teachers assign required reading homework.
They can’t find content 🔎
We have content that aligns with student interests, but unfortunately, our search is not optimized for students therefore it has been difficult for students to discover this content unless teachers present it to them.
Goals and requirements
Based on the insights from the research team, I huddled with my Product Manager to determine the goals and requirements for this project.
Goals
Validate the student POV
Students require different incentives and motivation than teachers. Can we validate the need for separate experiences?
Validate gamification
Students like games. Is this experiment a good approach to gaming on our platform?
Increase engagement
Our main metric at Newsela was always ENGAGEMENT. Will this drive student and teacher engagement?
Requirements
Low lift for teachers
I worked with subject experts to curate content for this initiative so that teachers don’t have to lift a finger.
Incentive for students
What is something that has longevity and gives students a reason to come back daily, weekly, or even monthly?
The UI must be on brand
I needed to design a student-centric experience, but I had to remain on brand. This will involve some creative liberties when needed.
OK. Whew! that was a lot of text
Here is a gif from one of my favorite scenes from How I Met Your Mother when Marshall and Lilly found out what Dowisetrepla stood for.
Workshopping ideas
I firmly believe that ideas don’t only have to come from the designer. Everyone at Newsela is passionate about improving the product. I held a FigJam workshop with my PM, engineers and content specialists to brainstorm ideas based on project goals and requirements.
Narrowing it down
After the brainstorm, I met with my PM, the engineering lead and a content lead to map ideas according to impact, product alignment and feasibility.
When coming up with concepts, I spent time expanding on ideas that clustered around the middle of the diagram.
Idea 1
A reading tour
The first idea I came up with was centered around learning through travel. Students would buy a ticket to a destination, read articles associated with that destination, and collect digital souvenirs along the way.
We decided against this as reading content specific to traveling could limit our efforts.
Idea 2
Daily reading streak
One idea from the workshop was a reading streak, which I thought would be a great way to get students to independently return and engage daily.
However, after further thinking, we decided against this option. We didn’t want to penalize students who didn’t return daily.
Idea 3
Coins
The last idea was allowing students to collect coins for reading articles and completing activities. Students will eventually be able to redeem the coins for items in a Newsela marketplace.
This was the winning idea!
Birth of the Reading Challenge
As a team, we decided Idea #3 would have the most impact, product alignment, and feasibility. The content team would be able to source articles for students to read on a monthly cadence. The articles will cover a number of interesting topics, giving students choice and autonomy. Students can engage as much or as little. Students are never penalized for lack of engagement.
We already have the content and resources
One thing Newsela has an endless amount of is reading content, and a reading challenge will allow us to repurpose our content. We will be adding value to something we already have instead of investing in a new feature that will require more time and dev resources.
It aligns with our company goals
We know students prefer a proper game. But Newsela is not in the business of just making things fun. At our core, we are a learning platform. The reading challenge gives us the opportunity to find a balance between learning, knowledge building, and gamification.
Mapping the flow
Teacher led
My first flow required the teacher to opt their classrooms/students into the reading challenge. This will give teachers visibility into what their students are reading independently on Newsela.
Student led
My second flow removes the teacher as the middle person. Instead, this allows us to get the reading challenge into the hands of students as soon as the content is available for that month.
User testing
I worked with a researcher to put together a test plan. We used teachers as a proxy due to legal restrictions on testing with children.
SIZE
9 teachers (as proxy)
TYPE
2 moderated, 7 unmoderated
GRADE
7 middle school, 2 high school
Feedback and recs
Flesh out rewards
I learned from testing that students will not interact if the ROI is not worth their time.
Add instructional copy
Outline the structure and outcome of the challenge to answer questions students may have about the reading challenge.
Add progress indicators
Students need to know where they are in the reading challenge and how much further they have to go. Kids will not engage if they can’t assess the amount of effort it takes to win.
Give teachers control and insight
Teachers want a way to control/modify the challenge if it’s not helpful to their students.
Modified designs
Student homepage
Instructional copy
I added instructional copy to the callout on the homepage, along with a modal to give students more information as to how the challenge works.
Progress bars
I added progress bars to each card to give students a sense of accomplishment as they complete activities.
Student-friendly UI
I worked with the brand team to come up with student-friendly graphics.
Reading topic page
This topic details page is where students will be able to learn more about the topic(s) they are interested in, as well as check their progress for each article within that topic.
We currently have no way of letting students know which article they’ve completed, so showing this gamified approach to “completion” will help us make the case for other forms of gamification across the student experience.
Rewards page
Rewards survey
I learned from user testing that rewards are crucial for engagement, but I wanted to make sure I got them right. Since we are unable to test with students, I came up with 4 possible rewards and created a survey asking students to tell us they’d like to redeem their tokens for.
Monthly reading badge
While we gathered data on the survey, as a low-lift, short-term solution, we rewarded students with a badge for reading a certain number of articles.
Teacher view
Giving teachers control
Even though this was meant to be low lift for teachers, I learned from user testing that teachers want a bit more control over the challenge. They were concerned that students would be too focused on winning rewards and less focused on assigned coursework.
I created an experience for teachers to be able to turn the challenge off in these situations.
The handoff
I dissected my designs based on how tickets were written for engineers. Since our engineering team was new contractors, I used the Eight Shapes Figma plugin to spec out pixel-perfect margins and padding rules and labeled reusable components to make the hand-off as seamless as possible for our new engineering team.
What does success look like?
We hoped to see a 5% increase in monthly activity completion
It’s hard to predict how students will engage with the platform month after month; therefore, we used independent engagement metrics from last year as a baseline. We launched to 30% of users. We aimed for a 5% increase in independent activities completed monthly amongst students.
A success
2 weeks after launching, we were already more than halfway to our goal. Within a month, we surpassed our goals.
602,003
Quizzes completed a 13.2% increase
51,122
Power Words completed a 205% increase
What I learned?
The challenge helped with visibility
Seeing the huge spike in Power Words lets me know that students love doing this reading activity, but perhaps Power Words engagement was low in the past because students couldn’t find articles with PowerWords. The challenge was curated in a way that surfaces those articles for students.
What could’ve gone better?
No student testing
Would’ve loved to get this in front of students rather than using teachers as a proxy, but due to legal restrictions around testing with people under the age of 18, we had to test with teachers only.
Students love collecting things...period
We launched a gaming experience without a rewards system, and students still ate it up. I’m excited for the rewards system as I’m sure it will be the cherry on top of our engagement metrics.
The impact of company layoffs
Our company went through a round of layoffs in which we lost our engineering team, so we had a setback for a couple of weeks while we figured out how to move forward.