Designing for Environmental Learning Platform for Primary Schools.

Earth Cubs is an Environmental Learning Platform for Primary Schools, with positive storytelling, planet-saving gaming, and action-based learning about sustainability and climate change.

Problem & Opportunity

Climate change is real, and climate anxiety is on the rise with children. There’s lack of tools for teachers to teach children about the environmental issues in a positive and fun way.

Earth Cubs makes environmental learning fun and engaging.

Inspiring the next generation of global citizens

There are two main parts to Earth Cubs. A mobile gaming app for kids and online interactive resources for teachers.

Educational gaming

The mission was to reach environmental learning to as many children as possible. So the app is completely free and kid-safe. Built in unity, we have launched 10 different environments with over 100 hotspots in the app (iOS and Android). Each environment is designed to teach a UN’s Global Goals theme. These include Life on Land, Climate Action, Affordable and Clean Energy.

I worked on 7 of these environments, designing the layout of the maps, hotspot games and creating engaging reward systems.

UX testing

We conducted user testing in schools to observe their behaviour and learning in each environment.

In order to measure successful learning, we created a set of knowledge harvest questions with a scoring system. We asked the same set of questions before the game play and after the game play to measure how much the child has learned from playing the environment.

Onboarding

Sign up and onboarding was happening in different user engagement life cycles for the web and app users.

Business Goal

Increase sign up in order to have a more accurate picture of our user database for the investors as well as being able to provide a more personalised experience for our users.

Existing Design

As an early stage start up, Earth Cubs wanted as many users playing the game as possible. So the existing onboarding was designed to get children playing the game as quick as possible, eliminating all barriers, creating their cub (avatar) immediately in few steps.

Our data showed that many users were simply ignoring the ‘Join for FREE’ CTA as it does not effect game play.

User Insight

User interview was conducted with 10 parents to understnad user behaviour. We discovered that once a parent downloads an app, 8 of the 10 participants would pass the device to their child to play and won’t revisit unless the child was blocked (by a pay wall or an ad).

This insight revealed an issue with our current onboarding flow where it asks the parent to sign up after the child has started engaging.

Initial Hypothesis

Exposing the benefits of signing up on first open of the app will encourage parents to sign up.

User Surveys

A parents survey was conducted to uncover what is most important to them in using an app for their children. We wanted to highlight these in the onboarding journey.

Prototypes

After many iterations of mock ups, the two final prototypes were user tested with 9 parents. The discovery was that 6/9 parents swiped through the prototype 1 without reading the slides, and 7/9 answered they prefer a video play of the app.

Measure: Failed!

We built and shipped the new flow. After monitoring the sign up rate after the new update, we realised that the number of sign ups only went up slightly. Our product team decided to go back to our initial goal. One of the key reasons of getting users to sign up was so that we could provide a personalised experience. We decided to look at promoting this.

New Hypothesis

Demonstrate a personalised experience in onboarding to encourage parents to sign up.

Mock Ups

New onboarding flow was designed. I decided to make the grown up views portrait instead of landscape, this is a more a common orientation people use to read information and it also easily distinguishes the grown up and children interfaces.

User Testing

I conducted user testing with 5 parents to test the new onboarding flow. The key finds were:

• 4/5 parents didn’t fully understand the meaning of different topics
• 3/5 parents felt the onboarding was too long

Designs

Reflecting the feedback gathered from the user testing, this onboarding was finalised. Collecting enough information about the user, but keeping it light so it doesn't overwhelm the onboarding process.

We will continue to build until we reach 17 environments to match the 17 Global Goals.

There's more

To see more work on Earth Cubs please get in touch!