Presento: Public Speaking Preparation Platform Case Study

A Google UX Design Professional Certificate project

Contents

The background

“Speak your mind about your next big ideas.”

Creativity, collaboration, and communication are the cornerstones of 21st century skills that needs to be developed by students around the world. Their ability to public speaking are more important than ever. Nowadays, public speaking, usually in the form of presentations, are commonplace in schools and universities.

Presento is a newly formed startup that aims to help students around the world to develop their communication skills and shape their future. They believe that there may be some unique challenges in this area that may be able to be solved with a product/service that is profitable yet socially responsible at the same time.

To begin this project, there are a lot of in-depth research needed on how students think and struggle with their public speeches.

Business goals

Discover business opportunities that can help students to prepare for their public speech.

Find out the right monetization strategy for the solution.

The research

Creating the perfect research plan

The most important part of conducting a research is to set the goal of the research itself. Then, the hypotheses are made.

Research goals

Understand what kind of public speaking students do and who are they for

Understand the end-to-end journey of how students prepare for their public speeches.

Discover what tools students use to prepare their public speech and how they feel about them.

Find out the challenges faced by students when presenting.

Discover what the students’ wants and needs to achieve their goals (i.e. to successfully address their audiences).

Hypotheses

Students’ public speech will usually be done for their teachers/lecturers and fellow students.

They use a slideshow maker such as PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi, or Canva.

Their main worry is voice control (intonation, rhythm, tone) when presenting.

User interview

Are those hypotheses really true, though? To find out, I conducted online interviews with several students aged 15-25 years old that has done public speech in the last 3 years.

Here are the insights gathered from the interview.

Research insights

Getting advice from experts

Practically all students interviewed wishes that they can meet with public speaking experts anytime, anywhere.

Judgement-free zone

Students wanted to get their expert advice in a private, judgement-free zone.

(Seemingly) limited resources

Students don't know where to find resources to help them learn techniques to master public speaking.​

Next, we can make personas and analyze competitors to represent both the user and business based on research.

The user

Persona of Thomas, a student who does presentations often
Persona of Thomas, a student who does presentations often.
Persona of Siska, a bootcamp mentor who use public speaking to deliver material to her students
Persona of Siska, a bootcamp mentor who use public speaking to deliver material to her students.

The competition

Even though there are no direct competitors for Presento that were found, there are several tools that directly inspired Presento: video call apps, calendar apps, and content curation services. Here are the inspiration we took:

The inspirations captured from Presento's indirect competitors to create a public speaking preparation platform
The inspirations captured from Presento's indirect competitors.

With the research done, competitors audited, and the inspirations captured, we can move on to the next step.

The wireframe

Sketching the solution

The sketch is designed digitally using Figma. It is verified using usability testing and iterated once. Design was started as a mobile application, then scaled up for tablet and desktop as a website afterwards.

Early wireframes

Early Presento wireframe
The early wireframe of the app.
Highlights of Presento wireframe
The highlight of the wireframe goals made in Figma.
Sitemap for Presento, a public speaking preparation platform
Presento's sitemap.

The first usability testing

This activity is done using moderated remote usability study with 5 testers, 15-25 years old, and are active students. Each session lasts 10-20 minutes and done without any additional tools to get their first impressions.

The insights are shown below:

First usability test insights

Insert slides when planning

2 out of 5 testers said that inserting slide/script should be available when planning the presentation.

Add replay session feature

3 out of 5 testers said that they would like to replay their session at a later date.

Review screen copywriting

3 out of 5 testers said that the copywriting for the review screen after a session are unclear: is it for the expert or the session?

Look into the camera!

Insight found: the position of slides/script should be on top, closer to the camera on mobile devices.

Articles or document?

2 out of 5 testers said that the how-to contents in the Explore screen look like documents instead of web articles.

The prototype

Designing a public speaking preparation prototype

The prototypes are an Android-based app and a Progressive Web App (PWA) that was inspired by Material Design 3 as the design guideline.

Before continuing the design process, I need to address the feedback from the first usability testing.

Mockups

Accessibility considerations

Presento accessibility considerations to improve public speaking learning experience
Presento accessibility considerations

The final prototype

To see all variations of screen sizes, click the Figma logo on the top left of the screen.

Style guide

The overall design choice is intended to evoke boldness and freshness. Dramatic, authoritative DM Serif for headings and the friendly humanist sans serif, Commissioner as the body gives Presento a sharp look, yet easy on the eyes.

The colors are also designed to stand out — an aura of teal fills the screen, emphasizing the point that Presento is truly fresh and different. Material Design icons helps to neat out the look, too.

Presento, public speaking platform style guide

The second usability testing

“That is so cool! I never thought I will need this. It certainly would help me to present better. I will definitely use this service and highly recommend it to my friends!”

A participant's impression on Presento

This activity is done using moderated remote usability study with 5 testers, 15-25 years old, and are active students. Each session lasts 20-30 minutes.

Overall, Presento is welcomed by all users who tested the prototype. Some even said that they never thought those problems can be solved!

The success rate of each task is 100% and the calculated Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 80. It can be said that Presento has met the needs and wants of students who are preparing for public speaking.

The conclusion

Helping students improve their public speaking is an interesting challenge

Creating a solution for social good is always a challenging yet satisfying project. In this case, Presento aligns with Goal 4 of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: quality education.

It pushed me to truly immerse with the people I designed this solution for, putting myself in their shoes and learn to think like them, down to the money they’re willing to spend.

Because it is very time-consuming to design an app and responsive website layouts single-handedly, I end up needing to learn how to use a lot of Figma’s features and extensive plugin support.

Thank you for reading this case study. I hope you enjoy it!

To connect with me, simply write your feedback in the contact page.