William Stewart

One of the best examples of my approach to design & leadership is a system I created as a radical rethink of offline learning. I have observed that the process of teaching fitness & martial arts is a bit broken for students & instructors.

I hypothesized that an online system could enhance outcomes, decrease workload and improve daily experience, even for classes that must be taught offline.

I was responsible for iteratively ideating, designing & testing. I nejoyed the opportunity to improve instruction quality while building & mentoring my leadership team. This system has been an ideal lab to try new behavioral UX design triggers.

• Status quo: After the initial buzz, students don’t see results from every class. Motivation drops; training effort “goes into a black hole”.
• Instructor planning is largely wasted when you have a variable attendance
• Teaching quality is blocked by wasted time on overhead tasks. Hard to delegate without much lower instructor standards

• Any desktop for in-class experience. Any web device desktop/mobile for student & instructor experience
• Extra screens needed for the foreplay (before class), water break & afterglow experience

• After the initial buzz, students don’t see results from every class. Motivation drops; training effort “goes into a black hole”.
• The students who quit & fail are extrinsically motivated & the students who succeed find intrinsic motivation to continue.
• Students who quit often feel guilty because they want the result but lack motivation.

• Planning classes for students is largely wasted effort when individual needs vary greatly.
• Time & group constrainst require that instruction be delegated to student leaders who could become instructors.
• However, student leaders felt unsure of how to lead & felt a conflict between helping others & their own wish to progress.
• Therefore, a formal leadership mentoring program was created.

• Sketched out a holistic system & user flows around training that weaves together attendance, live instruction, skill tracking & motivational nudges.
• Designed wireframes & flows to streamline bottlenecks in the system.
• Collaborated with my leadership team, who are also web designers & developers, to build & refine working prototypes & the production system.
• Videotaped gradings became a valuable part of skill progress. The videos provide concrete references for new skills & progress gained.

• Creating & mentoring leaders was the most important & valuable step in improving class experience & achievement.
• Mentoring leaders & providing them tools to simplify their tasks brought clarity & focus to every aspect of instruction.
• An AI system that forecasts who would show up at each class & what their needs would be allowed the elimination of instructor prep time.
• Instructors benefited from real-time automated lesson plans. As students showed up, Uplevel assembled an optimized plan to address each students’ needs & allowed students to be more self-sufficient.

• The UpLevel system transformed how students on-boarded, learned skills & evolved to become leaders.
• Design creativity was maximized since Uplevel had no precedent or prior student expectations. Rapid experimentation allowed the best ideas to surface as many concepts were tried & discarded.
• After years of iteration & refinement, instructor prep time was reduced ~96% while student outcomes greatly improved.
• Students achieved over 20% better results in 38% less time. Over time, retention improved by 63% by developing & reinforcing positive habit change.

• Mentoring leaders & delegating instructional tasks was the most rewarding and valuable step that was taken.
• By teaching mentorship as key to personal mastery, best practices were shared more efficiently & student achievement rose to higher standards.
• The holistic meta nature of Uplevel changed how things were taught. Students were taught to go beyond learning & competence to gain true mastery through mentorship.
• By automating & visually showing instructors how to optimally meet the needs of students in a class, Uplevel allowed unburdened instructors to focus on instruction quality & enjoy teaching more.