The DX of services aimed at expanding school business

Challenges

"Hobonichi School" (formerly "Hobonichi's School") was launched in January 2018 as a place to learn classics, but the company sought to expand it as a service that could be used by more users. With the concept of learning from "meeting people and listening to their stories," they aimed for a major renewal to broaden the scope of lectures and make it available as a smartphone app to reach a wider audience.

Hobonichi's priority was to deliver a learning experience as entertainment, different from the framework of conventional education and learning services, through a new video content service.

As this was a service delivering unprecedented value, and development was expected to involve exploration, they were looking for a partner who could accompany them from the service development planning stage and handle end-to-end digital product development, including UX/UI design.

Solutions

Monstarlab assigned experienced designers from their group's design consulting firm, "A.C.O.". They collaborated with product managers to create user stories, simulating how the app would be used in users' daily lives.

In the information architecture and UI design phases, they prioritized usability while effectively incorporating the many unique ideas that were characteristic of Hobonichi. Especially in areas prone to user churn, such as registration forms, they were mindful of designing without compromising usability.

For the unique feature requested by "Hobonichi School," which displayed the speakers' words as scrolling captions beneath the lecture videos, they conducted multiple rounds of verification using demos. By repeatedly gathering and incorporating feedback, they achieved an original design that pursued readability while ensuring it did not detract from the appeal of the main video content.

On the development side, they adopted Flutter, a cross-platform framework that supports both iOS and Android. They proposed agile development, which is resilient to specification changes, and refined the product through repeated PoCs with two-week sprints.