Designing A Learning Ecosystem
Overview:
I collaborated closely with key stakeholders to craft a high-level strategy for a brand-new plug-and-play learning ecosystem that catered to various user types and offered multiple program options, all supported by AI-driven and data-based personalization. Additionally, I designed strategic assets to help others understand and support this ecosystem.
Through my research, I know that much of online higher education is characterized by one-size-fits-all programs that rely on complex technology systems, stitching together various tools and forcing learners to navigate through different experiences to achieve their goals. These systems often have inefficiencies that lead to the need for manual workarounds and individual solutions. Moreover, technology limitations can prevent learners from receiving credit for their real-life experiences, ultimately resulting in longer and more costly educational journeys for students like me.
Our team was driven to make meaningful change in the industry, going beyond just designing better technological solutions. We knew it would also entail developing entirely new processes and ways of working. Achieving this change required buy-in from top executives all the way down to the staff on the front lines. Alongside the vision for a revamped education ecosystem, it's crucial to have effective communication tools that encourage dialogue, solicit input about the vision, and ignite enthusiasm for innovation and change.
The Opportunity & Solutions
My Challenge:
To co-design a new learning ecosystem that enables personalized and connected experiences, flexible pathways, and deeper learning & life alignment. To use my deep understanding of this vision to generate strategic assets to open dialog with all audiences and generate buy-in at all levels.
Journey Maps & Concept Flows
The vision for the ecosystem was large and complex, early presentations and discussions were able to build excitement for the project but did not help stakeholders deeply understand what the resulting experience could be. To help generate a more comprehensive understanding, I created narrative journey maps to illustrate some pathways through the proposed experience for different learner personas. Supplementing these, I also generated high level wire-prototypes that allowed stakeholders to click through example interactions to better visualize possibilities through this new vision. Finally, I worked with my team to generate concept art for different types of interfaces to aid in their understanding that the vision would yield something drastically different from existing system solutions. Many of these artifacts were socialized from the individual team level to the Board of Trustees, and helped make this vision the north star priority for the university.
Ecosystem Architecture
Working in partnership with our UX Architect, we spent considerable effort to diagram out the interactions, experiences, and flows of the proposed ecosystem. These diagrams were created by working closely with area experts and understanding the nuances of the opportunities in their spaces. The design and product management team worked in partnership to consider how the different parts of the ecosystem might interact across experiences, and to map dependencies between them. The resulting architectural diagrams were then socialized to the Google technical architects and dev leads to inform their work and help the engineering team deeply understand the goals of the work. The UX architect and myself worked hand-in-hand with Google to define the technical architecture for the ecosystem and identify which foundational features would be part of the first release. (See The First Release Case Study).
Bringing it all Together
As we approached the release date for our first foundational release of the ecosystem, we observed that the university had begun to look at the first release as a product in and of itself, rather than the foundational layer in a larger ecosystem. To realign the university on the larger vision I again engaged partner Ustwo and guided them to build an interactive narrative story that built a bridge between the current release and the future ecosystem. Using our UX architectural diagrams as the base for the work, I first pulled together a database of the features, functions, and interactions we aimed to build in future releases and tied them back to our foundational work. I worked closely with our Research & Insights team to map these to insights about our users, and brought in our Content Design Architect to use language consistent with the current business to help in understanding and adoption. Finally, at my direction, Ustwo built a series of high-fidelity prototypes for future ecosystem experiences and tied them together through an interactive narrative that was broadly socialized across the university and to external stakeholders. This effort successfully built stronger relationships with teams outside the product org and opened dialog about the intersections of our work to achieve the larger vision.
Results & Outcomes
Early emphasis of the technical solutions were ineffective at generating buy-in and understanding among key stakeholders. When I built interactive design artifacts that told the story of the future experiences we aimed to build, it opened doors for engagement, dialog, and participation from non-technical stakeholders.
University engagement drastically increased with the roll-out of these strategic design assets. The low fidelity prototypes encouraged other departments to add to and modify the vision to be inclusive of their teams goals and learnings. The high fidelity narratives helped make the vision feel more tangible and accessible, rather than an abstract future that would happen “one day”.
Investing time and resources into building out comprehensive UX architecture early in the process helped make smarter decisions in the technical design of the ecosystem, preventing us from making siloed solutions and instead emphasizing the holistic user experience across different parts of the ecosystem.