EIDU Self-learning

EIDU's mission is to become the digital learning platform for low-income countries, a market that caters nearly to a billion children. Some of them have to pursue their education in the most unfortunate learning conditions and they can greatly benefit from novel solutions like our self-learning app.

I joined the company in April 2018 as a developer and shifted a year later, in March 2019, to a Product Manager position. From that point on and together with Bassem Elshaer, I build up the Product team and introduced Agile processes. During this time, we also directed an integral renovation of the app in the UX flow and the UI design to better address the needs of our customers.

EIDU customers & EIDU users

I am fortunate to have been able to work together with directors, teachers & students in the low-income, private schools of Kenya. This is where it all started. Now EIDU has the goal to reach every African country and eventually, the world.

EIDU ecosystem

We provide low-cost hardware ($40 phones like the Neon Nova) and sponsored data for our users to teach with our system. One phone is enough for one class of 20 to 40 children. We also provide a custom Updater app to provide updates to the main EIDU app. Through the updater, users can also access additional content, e.g. users can download a onebillion app that provides the onebillion content to the EIDU app.

EIDU app

Unsupervised learning

Our app is the heart of our service to the schools. Teachers set up their class in the app, including pictures and optionally names of the learners. Once the teacher sets up the phone and passes it to a child, he or she can use the app unsupervised and then hand the phone over to the next child after his or her session is over.

Empty and not-so-empty states

We have found that the best way to onboard teachers is using empty states. The simple messages ensure that any interface or flow we introduce is simple enough to explained through one empty state or two (even after making one modification we may show a message). Also, this way, teachers learn to directly make changes to the actual interface and don't have to transfer their knowledge from a wizard section, video or overlay onboarding. For example, after creating and navigating into a class (screen on the left) the teacher is directly navigated to the Learners tab instead of the Teach tab (screen on the right) that guides with the next empty state to add the first learners.

Text over visuals

To our surprise and sometimes frustration, our teachers had troubles understanding visuals, e.g., a bar chart for showing progress. This started to make sense to us only when we realized that in schools, most information is presented in a textual or tabular form. We started omitting complex visuals in favor of descriptive text messages with great success.