Gooru

Abstracting Outward

Once we had established a working base line, we decided that we would spend the net two yeras defining and developing a ‘Vision’ prototype for the student experience, the teacher experience on laptop and mobile platforms, and a desktop-only district administrator experience.

Vision Prototype

To begin with, we focused primarily on the student side of the application, seeing as it was the most important tool in selling the product to universities and investors. It was absolutely vital that the student application covered a large amount of workflows, in order for it to be viable for students from the USA to Egypt to India, and beyond. We conducted several research and testing sessions with stakeholders ranging from grassroots educators in India to post-doctoral professors at MIT, to school principles and grade school teachers across several districts in the USA.

Alongside the vision prototype, we took the current student app, and worked on developing it in the general direction of the vision we had defined.

With our student platform setting a benchmark for product standards and principles, we set about examining the teachers’ role in the educative process, using their interactive touch-points as a basis for designing their platform. We first defined a standard “textbook curriculum” course structure, and then augmented it with a section called Daily Class Activities. This structure enabled teachers a sandbox environment that could be used to conduct spot-checks on students’ skills and progress, without affecting their curriculum scores. It was also

Designing for the future

Spurred on by the success of the design system, I took on the task for downsizing the components. It ended up with a whole new chapter of the design guide, with the design really looking polished and refined. By this time, development had also understood the mechanics behind the style guide, and their output was becoming more systematic. This significantly reduced time lost to redoing screens, discussions to explain guiding principles of spacing, colour and icon sizes, and instead opened the time up to discuss how we could further streamline our product and its development.

Personally Satisfying

In addition to the work itself, Gooru has played an important part in my personal development, too. They enabled me to travel the world physically, and in doing so opened opportunities for me to experience the world in ways previously unaccessible to me. I saw Californian Redwoods, drove Chris Bangle’s beautiful BMW Z4 down the pacific coast, cycled all of San Francisco, afford real Japanese food, travel the west coast on Amtrak’s terrific Coast Starlight, and work in an office space that I truly appreciated.

Gooru helped me discover several satisfying new ways to spend my time outside of work, and this is the kind of learning that I cannot put a price on.

5-Year Snapshots

In the span of 5 years, the clients’ UI requirement has grown considerably. When work began in 2016, the product was a browser-only, student-oriented offering. In the span of 5 years, we have expanded it to cover students, teachers, multi-tier administrators, guardians, investors & researchers. Additionally, the platforms have been developed to work on work-stations, laptops, chromebooks, tablets & mobile platforms.

I figured that after 5 years, it would be nice to make a little tribute to the colossal effort the team has put in, because almost everything was rebuilt from scratch. Underneath are snapshots of a handful of the platforms I’m constantly iterating on.