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The Year We Brought Entelechy To Life: My Learning Journey

Product Development, Start-ups

Written by: 

Thandi Gondwe

From start to finish, working with the Entelechy team broke the usual client/agency boundaries. We immersed ourselves on a journey through the ‘Entelechy Way’ and developed into Entelechy Learners, which has shaped us as an agency, as people - and me as an individual.

Entelechy Academy came to Hex as ‘the world’s first EdTech platform that enables the development of Character qualities which enhance all skills.’ They engaged Hex to develop an app that would deliver a personalised, lifelong learning programme that, unlike the standard constructs of education, rewards what is learned rather than memorised. This immediately got us all very excited, we just couldn’t wait to get our teeth into this. 

One of the most exciting parts of the challenge was that this is a move away from the traditional method of the learner relying on being taught, to a self-directed mindset. We needed to create an app which promoted this bold methodology, and enabled users to create their own journeys to develop their character.

Our immersion began by holding in-depth stakeholder interviews to discover the essence of Entelechy Academy, their learning methodology and how to translate this into an app solution. The main question being: how could we recreate real-life experiences to support improvement in character, behaviour and soft skills, within a digital space? To answer this, we focused on unlocking an innovative learning journey that facilitated self-directed learning.

As part of a thorough discovery phase including workshopping feature functionality and use cases, the entire Hex team was invited to participate in the Entelechy Academy coaching programme. We discovered just how innovative their learning methods were, and how the personal assessments they provided made the process of identifying the Character Qualities we wanted to work on incredibly nurturing and human. It was vital that we reflected this within the app. Going through the programme alongside strategising for the project, helped us to gain incredible insight. We felt much more confident in distilling our real-life experiences into specific learning journeys within the app.  

The Entelechy Learning Academy app

Character Qualities

There are 54 Character Qualities that we all possess to differing degrees, such as curiosity, compassion, assertiveness and sincerity. We develop them throughout our lives and they are the key drivers of our own success and well-being. We found that whilst working on our own chosen Character Quality journey, we also built deeper relationships with our colleagues.With every session, we were able to use what we learnt to enhance our digital solution. This helped us to focus our strategy on how to provide users with coaching tips throughout the app, whilst encouraging them to seek knowledge from their own communities. It was important that users felt inspired to go exploring, test their new-found skills and experience the real-life impact that developing character qualities can have.

Thorough immersion across key value propositions, competitor and market analysis enabled us to finalise our strategic ideation and create our product development and launch roadmap. Within this period, we aligned on launch requirements and detailed future iterations for development Post-launch. This was vital to ensuring we had a clear, long-term product roadmap.

Bringing the app to life through visual representation, we brought together UX & UI Designers to ensure the smoothest path for users to join the Entelechy journey. Hex also provided over 50 bespoke motion animations, each providing stories detailing the Entelechy Academy methodology and character qualities.  

Thandi at work on her learning journey

Guided Learning Journeys

Prototyping showcased an onboarding journey introducing the Entelechy concept and methodology, designed to engage and inspire new Learners and help them use the app to its full potential, completing a ‘Guided’ learning journey to show them how the journey works and set them up for effective self-directed learning.

Working in an agile manner, we continued to collaborate with the client through workshops, sprint reviews and attending their offsite meetings to discuss our progress. Once the designs were approved, we moved to full front & back-end development in our sprints to ensure all requirements were aligned with the designs. For bespoke features, we also created affiliate microsites to host offline features, as well as a provided design of a brochure site to provide Entelechy with marketing material ready for launch. 

It’s been such an incredible and fun experience bringing Entelechy to life, and going through the journey of discovery to creation. It brought with it a change of mindset to everyone involved and actually participating in the learning process gave us the insights we needed to make the product a reality.

Fast forward, and we produced an elevated app with all features ready for launch in the App store & Google Play stores in less than a year! I am so proud to have played a role in delivering a product which facilitates real-life character development, new habits for personal growth, and lifelong learning, as well as showcasing compatibility for company hiring purposes in the future. Entelechy has not only become a part of the Hex culture, but an incredible journey I intend to stay on.

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