AllGrow

Designing an app 0-1 for an education nonprofit to empower their community of learners, educators, and mentors.


Timeline: 16 Weeks

Roles: Product Manager, Product Designer, UX Researcher

1.0 : About AllGrow, Where Students Learn to Become Changemakers 🌱


AllGrow is a nonprofit organization from Romania working in the educational and community building space. One of their main initiatives is “Change Architects,” which aims to turn young children from spectators into architects of their own future through social entrepreneurship, community development, and collaborative projects.

AllGrow’s existing curriculum and educational ecosystem has already been successful in Eastern European schools. However, there is an opportunity to extend its proven educational curriculum by providing these resources to students worldwide by adapting the content into the digital realm.

🌎 How might we create a platform that encourages creativity, collaboration, and accountability among young learners on a global scale?

2.0: How Are Competitors Educating Their Students? 🔍


Based off of initial client meetings and conversations, we concluded that there were three feature priorities: gamification, social/community abilities, and project based learning. We wanted to understand how similar applications implement these features, and how we might be able to translate them to relevant solutions for AllGrow.

Through competitive analyses across education organizations, startups, and nonprofits, we came up with some potential solutions informed by initial research questions.

Ultimately, this lead to us proposing three prioritized features:

Personalized Onboarding

Introducing engaging narrative, project + mentor pairing

Journey Centric Dashboard

Modular lessons, digitize the activities of the curriculum

Social Tab

Points system + ongoing challenges/open projects

Points system + ongoing challenges/open projects

Points system + ongoing challenges/open projects

 3.0: How Are AllGrow Users Learning, Teaching, and Supporting Each Other? 🗣️


AllGrow has four main users: students, teachers, industry mentors, and company sponsors. Each of them have their own motivations for joining the organization, and have a unique perspective to bring to their project.

Out of all the AllGrow members that we reached out to, we were able to get 15 users’ feedback through interviews, surveys, and qualitative questions.

"We give them the autonomy to see that they can and know how to solve a problem, that we are with them giving feedback to each activity to encourage their activity, creates the necessary motivation during the implementation of the projects."

Floriana Necula, AllGrow Educator

Ultimately, we used their feedback to create and refine user stories that balanced student accountability for motivation, effective mentorship for connection, and group activities + collaboration for creativity.

4.0: Low-Fi Mockups


Through my ideation while keeping Duolingo's approach in mind, I opted to build a camera tool for Chinese learners to capture familiar artifacts from the world around them — if heritage speakers are having trouble with reading media that’s interesting to them, why not save and practice those phrases in particular? This significantly expands the vocabulary that Duolingo users practice when using the app, and ensures that they’re truly relevant and words of interest for the user.

  1. Upon navigating to the camera icon in the navigation bar, users are prompted by Duo to begin “capturing snapshots” with their phone camera.

  1. Users can change between languages they’re currently learning.

  1. From there, recognized phrases and words will be highlighted, where users can select and confirm the phrase of interest.

  1. They are then taken to the phrase’s definition page, where the pronunciation, definition, and example phrases are provided.

  1. Inside the Practice Hub, “Snapshots” are now an additional collection and a type of daily review.

  1. The Snapshots collection displays all the previously collected phrases alongside their respective pictures.


4.0: Taking to Figma to Draft Feature Designs 👩‍💻


We began drafting low-fidelity versions of these features. Our priorities at this stage were stakeholder alignment and ensuring that such a wide range of features felt cohesive and navigable. After frequent feature prioritization discussions, workshops, and PRD iterations (link here) with the AllGrow clients, we settled on the following features/app flow:

  1. Users sign up, and after some personal information, are placed into projects that align with their social innovation interests, and personal strength and growth areas.

  2. During the project, students can see the modular curriculum, complete activities, and communicate with team members during the course of the project.

  3. Throughout project modules, students will complete ideation activities based on the Allgrow curriculum using whiteboarding tools and complete knowledge checks.

  4. Throughout the project curriculum, students can receive points and badges demonstrating proficiency in certain competencies and achievements that can be redeemed for real merchandise.

  5. Throughout their time with AllGrow, all users can participate in community events in the Grow Hub hosted by fellow AllGrow members such as sponsor/company webinars, team building activities, demos, and more.

  1. Upon navigating to the camera icon in the navigation bar, users are prompted by Duo to begin “capturing snapshots” with their phone camera.

  1. Users can change between languages they’re currently learning.

  1. From there, recognized phrases and words will be highlighted, where users can select and confirm the phrase of interest.

  1. They are then taken to the phrase’s definition page, where the pronunciation, definition, and example phrases are provided.

  1. Inside the Practice Hub, “Snapshots” are now an additional collection and a type of daily review.

  1. The Snapshots collection displays all the previously collected phrases alongside their respective pictures.


5.0 Discovering Design Gaps With Low Fidelity User Testing 📝


We conducted usability testing with 15 users on usertesting.com, asking them to complete tasks related to onboarding, and curriculum/whiteboarding, and the points system.

6.0 Defining AllGrow’s Brand: Welcoming, Encouraging, and Educational 💙


Given that AllGrow did not previously have any branding. styling guidelines or requirements, we had full creative freedom to create a brand that was professional with a touch of playful.

5.0: Meet Duolingo Snapshots!


Introducing the interactive prototype of Duolingo Snapshots! With Snapshots, Super Duolingo users are able to capture any written media around them to save and practice, aiding their learning with relevant, real-world vocabulary. With the help of Duo and the rest of the cast, users can bring their environment right to the Duolingo app for more immersive learning.

5.0 Implementation and Duolingo Snapshots’ Potential



Duolingo Snapshots has a lot of potential for expansion! Here are some nice-to-haves and additional implementations:

  1. Location feature: logging where snapshots were collected.

  2. Social function: sharing what snapshots your friends have collected recently, or what snapshots were collected near a given location. 

  3. Notifications: personalized reminders of past snapshots.

  4. Edge case: when the character is misrecognized by the camera, implementing button that says “This isn’t right!” and allows the user to manually correct the character.