Designing Something New: The First Release
Overview:
I led out first greenfield software release, from concept to alpha launch. One of my goals was to enhance the retention, satisfaction, and engagement of first-year students who had little to no prior experience with online college education. Simultaneously, I piloted new ways of working and directed the design efforts across the org.
Our data analysis showed that first-year students who had little to no experience with online college education were not staying engaged and were dropping out more compared to students who were familiar with online learning. When we looked deeper by talking to these students, we found problems in their journey that were causing them to leave. These new learners struggled to find help, get in touch with the right people, and got frustrated when their information didn't transfer smoothly between different staff members.
To understand this better, my team interviewed the advising staff who work directly with students. Combining their insights with our research and data, we discovered several issues:
Our support and learning systems were not connected. This meant that learners who were new to higher education didn't know where to find help, and they often felt lost and unsupported.
Adult learners who were also working had trouble because we didn't have self-service support options and didn't offer flexible ways to communicate. They couldn't easily call their advisors during work hours.
All students, regardless of their experience, didn't have enough information about their course schedules or program milestones. This lack of clarity made it hard for them to stay motivated.
Our learning platforms and tools weren't user-friendly. Students had to spend a lot of time just figuring out how to use them before they could even start learning.
The Opportunity & Solutions
My Challenge:
To lead a cross-disciplinary team to design, develop, and launch an entirely new learning platform which addressed identified pain points. The new experience should encourage engagement, provide delight and joy, be enhanced by seamless and in-platform interactions, and embed targeted support in the experience.
Our Process:
Before beginning design and development, the team determined that journey mapping the both the current and future ideal experience was critical to understanding what we needed to build. Design leadership, our learning experience architect, and the research and insights team came together for a three-day workshop to map the journey and identify all the areas of friction and opportunity. This effort yielded an end-to-end journey map for the new prodcut:
With the journey map in hand, the design team worked closely with product management to define and author epics, requirements, and clarify problem statements. Simultaneously, I led the design team in a series of concept and design explorations to help them imagine what the end product might look like and to identify the different slices - alpha, beta, and MVP release, to get us there. Much of the team had never designed a wholly new product before, so we spent significant time on architecture and storytelling, documenting the product vision as a narrative story to aid in understanding and alignment around the common vision. Click to read an excerpt from the vision narrative.
The next several months the team worked closely with our development partner Google to deliver all the front-end designs for the new product. We provided early wireframes to aid in the build of a proof-of-concept, and prioritized more complex interface designs upfront to ease development blockers. Multiple design leads managed different pieces of the experience, and our weekly design reviews ensured cohesion and alignment across feature sets and deliverables. Throughout the build, designers worked hand-in-hand with multiple international development teams to manage and QA the experience, provide a consistent vision for the product, and solve blockers in real-time with product management.
Our alpha release went live in April 2023 to over 150 internal testers and users, and we launched a comprehensive accessibility audit at that time as well. Results of UAT and QA testing showed the need for significant improvements in performance and API timing, and the accessibility audit revealed some minor color contrast adjustments and screenreader tab order adjustments to make.
I have highlighted some of the core features of the alpha release here:
Dynamic Learning Pathways
Directly addressing insights from our research that identified a want for more self-service and visibility into current and future learning, the team worked closely with partners Ustwo to design and develop the learning pathway. This landing experience dynamically adjusts to show learners real-time progress on different learning tasks, celebrates completed work, and visualizes the full learning journey, personalized to each learner. Early testing showed that some learners preferred a more linear experience, our internal design lead led an initiative to enable users to toggle between map and list view directly in the UI.
Embedded & Personalized Support
The product was designed specifically for learners who had little to no online college experience, and our research showed that switching systems often cause significant stress and drop offs from these users. In answer to this insight, we designed a platform that dynamically populated the learner’s pathway with extra content designed to coach them through the executive functioning skills needed for self-directed learning. This content would appear when learners reached certain milestones or events, and would often also include directed outreach from coaching staff directly in the platform.
In-Platform Communications & Community
One of the major pain points in the existing journey were the limitations on communications and community - learners could only call their advisors at set times, or email off hours, they could only interact with each other through formal discussion boards, and academic support was only for the proactive.
In the new platform, I worked closely with the CEO of InSpace to imagine a new kind of community ecosystem, one that enabled learners to get support, chat with peers, or jump into synchronous sessions through a single simple floating button that would be present throughout the experience. Managing both Google and InSpace, the team’s design lead executed on the alpha version of this vision.
As this feature matured, we defined a future scope that would enable an AI-powered personal assistant to co-exist in the communication hub to provide off-hours and supplemental support.
Results & Outcomes
My team, together with our vendor partners, were able to move from first vision to alpha release launch in 11 months, creating a wholly new digital learning platform.
The alpha release included a multi-role sign in experience, learner and staff profile pages, learner pathways interface, over 200 pages of scaffolded learning content and dynamic support content, interactive assessments, in-app communications (video, messaging, asynchronous), achievements, staff assessment and learner management, and staff communication tools.
The release also laid the foundation for personalized learning through user data and event-based triggers, AI supported personal assistants and knowledge management, and automated nudges and notifications based on user status and progress.
This greenfield release also spurred the design, prototyping, and iteration of new ways of working in order to keep user experience at the heart of all decision-making between product, design, and our development vendors. (See The Experience-Led Product case study)
Designing the alpha required deep collaboration with AI and learning platform experts from Google, resulting in a future-facing product that merged user experiences designed by my in-house team with the technical expertise from Google to lay the foundation for future innovations.