The Context

Mandarin is gaining traction as a second language in UK schools, but teaching resources and community support remain limited.
The Bonsai Language Foundation’s goal is to raise Mandarin teaching standards and empower teachers with the tools to succeed.

The Problem

Mandarin teachers across the UK are few and dispersed, making it difficult to collaborate, share resources, and support one another. Bonsai Language Foundation currently lacks a digital tool that builds connection, resource sharing, and continuous professional growth within the Mandarin teaching community.

The Goal

Design a digital platform that becomes the central hub for Mandarin teachers in the UK where they can access high quality teaching resources, contribute materials, and build a sense of community.

Success will be measured by:

• Increase in platform engagement and contributions
• Growth in resource downloads and uploads
• Steady rise in active users within the teaching community

 

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Empathise -> Conceptualise -> Design -> Test

 

1. Empathise

 

We lacked understanding of Mandarin teachers’ needs, wants, and expectations. First, we want to find out from the teachers:

• Current frustrations and pain points
• What did they really want? or need?
• Do they want a community or a resource site?

We kicked off with a 3-day Lean UX workshop and user interviews

• Facilitated a collaborative Lean UX workshop with the Bonsai stakeholders to align on goals and ideas
• Conducted interviews with 8 Mandarin teachers to uncover real user needs
• Created user personas, empathy mapping

Post-its from workshop brainstorming

Putting the Lean UX framework into use. We mapped business outcomes so as to gain clarity.

 

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User personas Through identifying user personas, we uncovered potential pitfalls and began addressing them. We also know which user group to prioritize on.

 

Empathy mapping Keeping the user quotes in their original form is a powerful way to help our stakeholders connect with user needs.

Affinity statements By clustering user insights into themes, it reveals wants, needs and pain points. It helps me to make clearer recommendations to our client

 

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2. Conceptualise

 

With a tight deadline, I dived straight into wire-framing to shape the product experience. I focus on making the features intuitive and reducing friction, especially for the teachers who are time-strapped by their profession.

Wireframing

 

3. Design

 

Homepage Search and find-ability is everything – A prominent, site-wide search bar on the hero banner Fast access to high quality content – Sort by popularity, recently added. Build a sense of community at first glance	Search feature Teaching material is highly differentiated (level, skill, topic) We gave users the extensive tagging ability to tag their content, so that it is easily searchable by filters Ability to preview the resource before downloading
Uploading resource Uploading a resource involves multiple fields, which can be overwhelming for time-starved, non-tech-savvy teachers. To ease the process, we use pre-filled drop-downs and smart tagging suggestions For adding blog posts, we designed a visual editor with live preview to make editing more intuitive.	Admin management Admins need clarity, not complexity We made engagement metrics easily accessible on Admin dashboard. This gives SCLF admins the ability to know real-time performance of the platform (Eg. Upload/Download frequency, top contributors)

 

4. Test

 

After we launched the website and let it run for a year. We studied our Google Analytics and user metrics to see how it was doing. We found that:

• Strong initial uptake
• Downward trend in User retention
• Low contribution (Uploads) vs High consumption (Downloads)

After initial uptake, it was hard to sustain interest of the users. The user activity began to go down trend. We can also see there is a trend of teachers preferring to download resource, rather than contributing it. Highlighting a potential area of improvement.

 

User activity metrics

 

We wanted to investigate why the platform was not gaining much traction so we conducted usability interviews and concluded:

• Uploading resources felt time-consuming
• Poor search results turned users away
• No incentives/personal benefit for them to contribute

 

5. Iteration

To reduce friction and effort on the users’ part, we put forth these recommendations:

When user uploads a resource:

• User can tap into AI-generated image thumbnails, and AI-generated summarised content and tags. This will greatly ease their workload in contributing of a resource.

When user retrieves a search result:

• Search logic will be enhanced with Elastic AI, which will make resources easier and quicker to find.

 

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Key reflections

 

Great product comes with great synergy

Software is not without groundwork promotion from the client side, as well as absolute trust to run the project autonomously, within careful consideration of the client’s budget and constraints.

Rigorous research guides solutioning

Rigourous research has allowed me to unearth actual user problems and involve the team of Devs and stakeholders to solve the problems that UX alone cannot solve.