Ubongo is constantly striving to improve its existing educational products as well as develop new platforms to be used by youth across Africa. One way that we ensure we are making progress is to use focus groups for user testing. As a social enterprise seeking to educate children, naturally, our product testers are children! After receiving parental permission, we invite local groups of youth of various ages either to the Ubongo office in Dar es Salaam. The user testing team also makes the site and home visits often to reach other children.
Once we have gathered a group of children, we might test new songs, new story-lines, new animation segments, entire new episodes, or new characters. In some ways, this stage of the process is easy because the children are very honest with their feedback, whether they like something or not. However, we are not simply trying to learn if children enjoy something new from Ubongo, we are also looking to see how and if they are learning. We test many user groups repeatedly over time to gauge retention rates and comprehension improvement. As an edutainment company, all of these elements are important to us because we want to continue to provide fun, engaging, educational programmes that encourage children in Africa not only to learn about topics such as Mathematics and Science but to love the process of learning.
