Gradeup: Improving User Experience Using Social Engagement

Gradeup is one of the largest community of students who are preparing for exams like SSC, Banking, UPSC, GATE, CAT, CTET, JEE, NEET etc. More than a million students study on our app every month, apart from the millions of students, who visit our website for content.

Our primary focus is to provide the user with a great experience in all the aspects of exam preparation like reading content, practice or doubt resolution. This has helped us to achieve the feet of a million MAU’s (Monthly Active Users) on our app and has motivated the students to practice more than 100 million questions per month.

Era of Social Engagement:

Our current focus is on the social engagement between the users, which is a key aspect of any community.

We show a personalised home feed to every user based on the exams they have subscribed at the time of onboarding. The home feed consists of the posts from mentors on Gradeup, subject wise quizzes along with the posts & queries of Gradeup users.

We have leveraged our huge community of users, to create a social platform so that users can share information and help each other by answering queries posted by other users.

The users might not have the internal trigger to answer other user’s queries. So we have made the following changes to the product in order to make them motivated to take the action.

1. Ease of answering questions:

We wanted to keep minimum interactions for a user to answer a query so that it's easy to take the action. Instead of having a user to click on the post and then answer the query, we worked on a flow so that the queries can be answered directly from the home feed. This improved the user experience as a whole and helped the users to answer more queries. The number of queries that got resolved increased by close to 100% post its implementation.

2. Getting credit for correct answers:

Getting a due credit and appreciation goes a long way in keeping the users motivated to solve the queries. For this we added a feature called “Thank you”. When a person answers a query and if the user likes the answer, they can thank by clicking on “Thank You” button present below the answer. The total number of “Thank You” ever received by a user can be seen in the user’s profile tab which is accessible to any other user.

A user keeps accumulating credits for answering queries, which increases his credibility among other users on the app. This would keep him motivated to solve queries and be engaged with the community.

3. Ease of finding the unanswered queries:

Every user is capable of solving certain types of queries based on their skill set. A simplified process to find the right query for a user would increase the chances of a query being resolved. The Gradeup home feed consists of mentor posts, Gradeup user posts and queries. In this the primary issues faced are:

• Difficulty in finding un-answered queries in the home feed.

• The user may not be interested or capable of answering all the queries. He may be strong in some subjects and he would prefer to solve the queries from those subjects.

We therefore introduced a separate “Queries Section“, where the user can see all the unanswered queries in the exam categories the user is subscribed to. Moreover, the user can filter the queries based on the exam they are preparing for and the topics they are interested in.

4. Getting the best solution to a problem:

The original poster of the query has an opportunity to mark a particular answer as a best answer. This makes it easier for other users and they can refer to just one answer among multiple answers.

What’s the way ahead?

As a result of all these, the percentage of the queries which are answered have improved marginally and queries of many users are getting resolved.

We will continue to experiment and innovate in this area so as to give a great user experience which will motivate them to use our platform for learning.

About the author:

The writer is Marketing Manager at Gradeup. For more information in all the latest govt job exams, download gradeup app from Google Play Store.