Manhattan Prep: Interact
Roles: Video Producer, Production Manager, UI/UX Designer, Instructional Designer
I managed production of Kaplan and Manhattan Prep’s Interact products from 2013–19. Manhattan Prep served test-takers of the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and SAT exams. Interact is a choose-your-own adventure video program that covers all the content for an exam with 20–30 hours of instruction, animation, and gamified activities. Interact was sold as a stand-alone product and was also leveraged as a supplement to in person classes and tutoring.
Here is a product demo video my team created for the sales page for Interact for GRE:
This is a demo lesson covering quantitative skills for the GRE:
With each iteration of the Interact program, my team improved the production value of our videos and the learning experience for students.
Interact for SAT (2019) was the final iteration of the product, and we made some adjustments to better serve a high school audience. Previous Interact lessons were taught by adult instructors for adult students, but for SAT we cast high school students to appear alongside the instructors. We also incorporated more color, animation, and graphics in the videos and interface surrounding the lessons. We predicted that these elements would connect with a youthful audience that has many study options in a free market, including highly entertaining social media content.
Here is a walk-through of the SAT experience:
Results
The Interact products replaced a series of recorded video lectures for each Manhattan Prep course. It is more expensive and labor-intensive to make a branching video experience than to record video lectures, but Manhattan Prep’s hypothesis was that this format would perform better than non-interactive self study products. Here is some data showing how Interact surpassed previous offerings:
Five months from launch, sales for Interact for the GRE (2018) grew 136% over the old, non-interactive self study product.
A year from launch, sales for Interact for the GMAT (2014) grew 46% over the old, non-interactive self study product.
Three years from launch, the Net Promoter Score (NPS*) for Interact for GMAT was 82. NPS is an imperfect measurement of customer behavior, but this score increased 180% over the old, non-interactive self study product (NPS was below 45), and was at least 328% better than the NPS scores for competitors’ GMAT self study courses (NPS 18 and 25).
* NPS is calculated using the question, On a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being extremely likely, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?, subtracting the percentage of detractors (1–6) from that of the promoters (9–10.) Apple’s iPhone NPS is 70.
Project Management
I kept our production progress organized with diagrams, spreadsheets, and gantt charts. Flowcharts were necessary for visualizing the various learner paths through the lesson.
A challenge to our production was estimating the duration of each lesson and the scope of work required because some topics needed more explanation than others. Custom interactions and animations were the most time-consuming elements to produce, and some topics required more or fewer of these elements. For a project that takes 6–12 months to develop with a publicly-announced launch, we needed to deliver on time. I broke down our production process into a concise outline where we could allocate time budgets and teammates.
I used gantt charts to provide a zoomed-out view of our progress. These charts are effective as a reporting method for project stakeholders.
Testimonials
Here are some user testimonials from Interact:
The lessons are clicking with me, and I really appreciate being able to pick up a book or watch a lesson at my convenience. I also like how the lesson is adaptive to individual timing, thinking, and answers.
After using Interact for GMAT my score jumped from 530 to 730 in 8 weeks.
I am loving Interact for GMAT! I thought I'd let you know, as it's really playing a key motivator to practice regularly, despite my rather crazy working hours. Good work you guys.
It combines the best of both worlds from group instruction and personal study, in that you can work through what lesson you want, at your own pace, while also providing a clear organization of concepts and the slightest bit of interpersonal element that helps motivation for studying.
I tackle each lesson with excitement and real energy! It’s so much fun and still extremely useful - I already look forward to my next lesson.
Instructional Design Theory
Taking cues from Richard E. Mayer’s Multimedia Learning we incorporated the following principles of multimedia instructional design:
Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures and sounds are excluded rather than included.
Signaling Principle: Students learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.
Redundancy Principle: Students learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and on-screen text.
Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
Segmenting Principle: Students learn better from a multimedia lesson that is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
Pre-training Principle: Students learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
Modality Principle: Students learn better from graphics and narrations than from animation and on-screen text.
Multimedia Principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
Personalization Principle: Students learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
Voice Principle: Students learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine-generated voice.
Image Principle: Students do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.