Textbooks and Expert Solutions

About

Quizlet expert solutions is an important part of the Quizlet learning ecosystem. We launch in 2021. We have 20M unique users, 59k net new subscribers, and establishment as the most used paid feature on Quizlet. Quizlet expert solutions provide users with high-quality textbook solutions.

Project Description

Quizlet expert solutions is one of the Quizlet core products. The quizlet expert solution provides step-by-step expert-verified textbook solutions and questions to students’ hardest problems.

My Role

Product design

Responsibilities

Design research, Concept development, Design strategy, Wireframe, UI design, Interaction design

Timeline

2020-2021

Problem Definition

The challenge we are facing is how to build a trustworthy textbook platform to help students quickly locate their textbooks and questions and help them learn more effectively. And how we can convert more paid users.

Locate the questions

Help users quickly find their textbooks and locate their questions. So they can improve learning efficiency.

Help students learn

Not just show the answers. We want to help students learn more efficiently and engage more deeply with their academic work.

Drive sub revenue

We want to become the top homework help site. And become a driver of subscription revenue for Quizlet.

Persona

Kathy Wang, 18 years old, 12th graders in YorkPrep

Problem statement

Kathy is a senior student in school of YorkPrep. She is struggling to find the help for her calculus class. She trying to find how to solve one of her calculus homework. But too hard to find the right information from online textbooks and the solutions are not trustworthy.

Goals

Quickly find the solutions to her questions. And she doesn't want to simply know the answers, she wants to learn how to solve the questions so she can solve similar questions by herself.

Frustrations

Quickly find her textbook among a large amount of information online; Knowing how to solve the question rather than just knowing the answers.

User journey map

I created a user journey map to identify the most important functionality our users need.

Concept development

We started with whiteboard discussions, then we created Paper wireframes to identify all the elements we need and we also created Low-fidelity prototype to help us to quickly test and validate the design concepts. We made the following design decisions.

1. We want to build an easy navigation system that follows the textbook so users can locate their questions easily.

2. We want to show step by step solutions so users can learn the step they are struggling with.

3. We will provided expert verified solutions so students can trust the answers.

4. We want users can quickly search and ask questions without type all the questions.

Challenge

The challenge we are facing is different textbooks are having different structures. Most textbooks have a table of contents, sections, and exercises. Some of the textbooks also have questions that do not belong to any of the exercises. So we have to find a way to for users to find these questions. Also, one exercise may have multiple questions. how we let users find the questions they are looking for is important. Also, we need to design a power editor tool to support KaTex, LaTex editing.

Usability study: Findings

Upload questions

Users want to scan the question or upload the photo of the question to get help.

Multiple answers

Users want to see multiple answers to better help them to learn.

Ask expert to help

Users want to ask follow up questions with expert to get extra help.

Share the textbook

Share the textbook with friends and save the textbook for themselves.

Mockups

Here are some design flows. You can also find the live product in Quizlet.

Web expert solutions

Mobile textbook scan

Impact

Quizlet expert solutions launched at the end of 2021. As of Nov 8, We have 1,511,230 new verified solutions created, hundreds of thousands more existing solutions cleaned up and verified, 19,819 textbooks added to our database and 4,285 textbooks completed.

Quizlet expert solutions are an important part of the Quizlet learning Ecosystem. We have 20M unique users using explanations, 59k net new subscribers, and 15 % of Plus users are using explanations. Quizlet expert solutions are established as the most used paid feature on Quizlet.

Next step

Next step for Expert solution, we are level up students homework game with AI-powered tutoring. Tap into the power of AI for instant access to concept definitions, personalized explanations, and practice problems.

We also want to extend our authoring pipeline to enable the Content Team to efficiently author explanations and verify content regardless of the source of the question. Evolve our solutions pages to support a variety of configurations. Enable courses and Key Concepts to help act as an organizing structure for questions.