How can design make learning feel like less of a chore?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Flat out, people usually won’t go out of their way to learn something new. Research shows that only 3% of adults in the U.S. spend time learning during their day.¹

Think about that for a second: Despite all the information available at our fingertips, and all the new technologies that emerge seemingly overnight, 97% of people won’t spend any time actively seeking out new knowledge for their own development.

That was the challenge at hand when our team at Google set out to create Primer, a new mobile app that helps people learn digital marketing concepts in 5 minutes or less.

UX was at the heart of this mission. Learning has several barriers to entry: you need to figure out what, where, how you want to learn, and then you need the time, money, and energy to follow through.

This meant our UX needed to serve double duty: The app needed to be inviting and intuitive, and it needed to overcome all the factors that keep people from learning.

To tackle that challenge, we thought about the three main places where users would spend time in our app: the dashboard, the individual lessons, and the activities within each lesson.

1. Dashboard

The dashboard is incredibly important because it’s the first thing people see when they open the app. We iterated and prototyped different dashboards for months. We had lots of ideas: lesson packs, letting users pick from three random lessons, geolocation for events related to the lesson topic, or special widgets about experts and brands we worked with. The possibilities were endless.