Interverse
UX Design, Visual Design — 2016-2017
Interverse is a platform I imagined to help one quench their thirst for knowledge by bringing together the greatest content on any topic. Create a personalized learning plan on the fly and see the big picture by combining your understanding of multiple disciplines.
The Challenge
A quest for the integrative learning tool
Most online learning resources available today offer a structured learning path, where you follow a set curriculum from beginning to end. This structure is well adapted for those who want to specialize in a certain field, but is less attractive for the curious ones who constantly aim to expand the breadth of their knowledge and connect different disciplines. Taking a course on everything isn’t efficient nor effective for achieving that goal, especially when you have a specific question in mind that doesn’t require a complete understanding of the discipline.
Unstructured learning, like browsing through Wikipedia and watching Youtube videos, is a much more effective process, but happens quite haphazardly and has its own issues. Youtube is not focussed on knowledge, making hard to find the best tutorials on a specific topic, and although Wikipedia is knowledge focussed, it lacks the explanations and visual support that videos have.
Integrative learning takes the best of both worlds. In an age where the wisdom about the whole (a coherent world view) becomes even more important than the knowledge of the parts, we seek to connect our understanding of many disciplines and to learn by integrating new information with our existing knowledge. Integrative learning aims to provide that flexibility by letting us jump right into the heart of any subject and to expand our understanding from that point forward.
Criteria of a good solution:
Gives the ability to start with any part of the topic
Sorts and presents the best content currently available of each topic
Presents information in various learning formats
Gives the ability to easily jump to related knowledge
Is personalized: keeps track of what you’re interested in
The Solution
An encyclopedia, but better.
When the urge is felt to understand something, the fastest way we found to get there is by searching for the topic by keyword and expanding our knowledge from there forward. Instead of getting a full course on Artificial Intelligence, you can dig into matters by looking up “Backpropagation Algorithm” and getting the best explanations on the topic through videos and articles. By starting at the heart of the subject, you quickly find out what fundamental knowledge you’re lacking and learn in a more goal-oriented way. We tried to reproduce this by collecting the best content for each topic and letting the community vote for what’s most helpful.
Topic subscription
Knowledge constantly evolves, new studies are completed, better explanations are recorded, new ideas are written down. Subscriptions can be activated on any subject, either for the fundamentals, the in-depth content and the news on the topic. Subscribing to fundamentals allows the user to build a personalized learning plan and receive a set amount of content each week (specified in the profile).
Contributions
Quality content isn’t found by sorting on popularity (which is a function of popularity itself) so we made Interverse a curation-based platform, where users can submit the content they find the most useful. The submitted videos and articles are rated by other users and the contribution of the submitter is then calculated. When submitting a link, the user is notified whether this content has already been submitted in the past and, if so, its current ranking.
Onboarding
The landing page was designed with inspiration and simplicity in mind, to stand out from other online learning platforms that tend to be cluttered and often fail to inspire curiosity. The goal was to start the story with an inspiring message, passing the vision that learning should always be about discovery and curiosity.
In-app onboarding
When a product is referred by a friend or colleague, users often skip the landing page instructions and sign up to the platform right away. To make sure that the in-app experience is fluid and new users understand the key features of the platform, a few in-app introduction screens were created. Note that this is a concept and the illustrations would be replaced by more concrete and useful representations.
Basic brand identity
Understanding gives you the ability to perceive the world in a whole new way. When we learn about geology, we want to see the earth, we want to feel the scale and importance of what we get to understand. With the branding of Interverse we aimed to reconnect knowledge with the real world by incorporating awe-inspiring imagery.
