mLevel Overview
mLevel is a SaaS-based platform that allows you to quickly create and deliver highly interactive learning activities to your employees to play anytime or anywhere. The platform consists of a mobile players app, an admin panel, and a full analytics dashboard.
My Role
My contributions as the Lead UX Designer spanned 3 years and included design and product strategy from the ground up as part of a 15-20 person team. Specific projects focused on gamification strategies, admin panel simplification, and rich analytic designs
Research
At mLevel, we built a community for our users to provide feedback and be part of user testing. Our team loved watching people play our games to learn from them. It was easy to track if our end users were learning through our games by simply tracking their learning progress to discover areas that we could improve in both our game question generation and delivery.
Unity Game App
Our end users, employees of large corporations, were given access to mLevel to complete required training. This training could range from new market materials to proceedures and sometimes included compliance training
The UX team's projects spanned the entire Customer Journey. We designed the interaction points in the login and platform navigation, the gamification techniques within the games and the platform, and we even created the graphics the games that housed the content.
Admin
A big differentiator for mLevel was the admin panel. Everything you needed to create a set of games that could be pushed out to the end users was there. Admins select any number of games from the library and stuff them with a set of questions. Score thresholds are assigned for passing each game and the set of games as a whole. And admins can assign sets to different groups of people within their organization.
As we started to research what learning professionals needed, we knew they need an engaging way to 'teach' and 'test' the employees at their organizations. But we learned the bulk of a learning professional's job was to create questions for testing and it is a time-consuming activity. Our team set off to dynamically build questions from a grid of content. We studied question structures and developed a templating system that pulls values from a grid to populate question and answers.
Those questions are also dynamically tagged with the different subjects so learning professionals could quickly search for content to add to their games resulting in the ability to spin up customized games on the fly.
In addition, the companies we worked with needed to customize everything from their logo to background images. We went as far as allowing them to customize the game text introducing the game. This ability to fully customize the experience required us to test alternative ways to present direction to those playing our games. We studied several different approaches, including how to play intos, coaching marks (big in 2014), and progressive learning. In the end, we discovered the more our users played, the more they learned, so it was our decision to create a hybrid approach which caused most users to continue playing to figure it out.
The learning industry is evolving
mLevel continues to impress customers with the customizable approach to learning. Our distinctive approach to teaching through games is not a new concept but takes making games fun seriously. The big value is that using our platform, learning professionals can create the experiences they need without using a middleman to build a dynamic experience for their questions.