Students were practising CPR with no idea whether they were doing it right. I rebuilt the training so they learn by doing, and 15% more finished.

The original app delivered CPR instruction through video and narration. Students watched a sequence of clips, listened to a voice-over, and moved to the next section. There was no interaction, no feedback on compression quality, and no way to track progress. The format was 100% passive.

Each student operated on their own device while tracking a shared teacher screen and a physical CPR pillow. Three simultaneous attention targets in a room full of talking teenagers. 85% of students said they were confused.

The app assigned no role to teachers. They pressed next on a laptop to advance slides. Some wanted more involvement in the lesson. Others treated it as a mandatory checkbox.

I interviewed six students and three teachers at one UK secondary school to understand how the training played out in a real classroom. Laerdal had prior field testing across 100+ school children in the UK, so broad usage patterns were already documented. My research targeted why, looking at what students felt, where teachers stepped back, and which moments caused confusion.

A team of seven conducted a cognitive walkthrough of the full experience to map friction points before speaking to students. The walkthrough surfaced three structural problems. The app offered no moments of delight, it expected teamwork without facilitating it, and it left classroom distractions unaddressed.

Students engaged most through story, through working with a partner, and through feedback they could act on right away. The existing app offered none of those.

The original app was a fully developed product already running in classrooms, so this was a rebuild of the experience on top of it rather than a new build from scratch. I replaced the linear video sequence with a story-based structure built around a person to save, one instruction at a time, paced by the student. The narrative gave each step a reason. Students moved through the training because the scenario demanded it, not because a timer expired.

Teacher engagement was split. Some wanted direct involvement. Others pressed next and stepped back. Forcing participation would alienate the second group. I designed pause moments between activities where teachers could step in, ask questions, or add context without a script. Three designers and two researchers worked on the redesign over six months.

The redesign introduced five changes to the training loop. A story structure replaced the video playlist. Live feedback on compressions replaced silence. A paired quiz replaced individual multiple choice. Visible progress per student replaced a blank status bar. A class-wide celebration at the end replaced an abrupt stop.

Each change targeted a specific gap in the original. The story addressed passive consumption. Live feedback addressed the absence of any quality signal during practice. The paired quiz addressed isolated recall. Visible progress addressed disorientation. The celebration addressed the missing sense of closure.