Role
Business
Duration
Tools
Lead Designer
Team of 5
Udemy
2 Week Design Sprint
Problem Statement
Jacob wants a personalized experience while learning so that they can thrive in a collaborative learning environment.
How Might We solve Jacob's problem?
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How might we help Jacob interact with other student users on Udemy?
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How might we help Jacob make informed decisions on course selection for new skill acquisition?
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How might we help Jacob engage more with his learning from a mobile environment?
Key User Goals
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Users need to be able to personalize their learning experience through their own choices.
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Users will be able to interact and engage with other users through a group learning feature.
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Users can set a schedule for set study times for themselves or their group members.
Discover & Define
Goal of Research
Methodology
The goal of research in this case study was to understand the purpose for why users utilize the mobile learning experience.
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Our group knew that Udemy’s goal as a business was "Innovation for Learner Success at a Global Scale".
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The goal has always been to increase the amount of users on the application. Whether that be by enriching environments with access to mobile learning or simply offering thousands of different types of education with unique learning resources.
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We needed to know directly how users felt when going through the mobile learning experience. What were users saying? What were they thinking? How did they feel? And Why?
Field Studies
Contextual Inquiry
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Competitive Analysis
Through analysis of competitors I was able to get familiarity with the expectations of online education and educational applications.;
Affinity Mapping
Gathering insights to push our research in a positive direction for the users while still meeting business goals.
Research Process
Starting the research phase with a contextual inquiry of Udemy’s current state, as users are viewing it today. We performed testing and interviews with people who have used a mobile learning experience alongside those who have not. The goal was to get data on Udemy from all perspectives so we can understand how to design for all users. Our affinity mapping of the results and insights was vast, but it allowed us to understand just what users are looking for and what they are having problems with. A quote that sums up the experience for most users is”I just prefer learning in a classroom environment because of interactions with others”
I then moved on to doing a competitive analysis of at least 5 direct and up to 4 indirect companies. Ranging from direct rivals such as Coursera, EdX, SkillShare and SkillSoft but also indirect businesses like Brilliance, DuoLingo and more. We made it a point to understand why Users engage with mobile learning as a whole. Through our competitive analysis we found that Udemy isn’t producing the same business results as competitors based on feature offerings focused on engagements and interaction. We understood that our competitors were striving to engage with users in a way that doesn't differ too much from a traditional setting. Rivals focused on the learning environment rather than the amount of education available. It's as if one’s comfort determines their ability to learn. Comparatively we found that our indirect competitors were focused on cultivating interaction with their users through gamification and community engagement. All of the competitors wanted users to get on the app, and they wanted those users to stay on the app. From discussion and community discourse, to file sharing, activity interactions, and gamification, our competitors had what we were lacking according to the analysis and previous testing
Actionable themes
Through our Journey Mapping we were able to find some common themes that helped influence our design ideation.
Who are the Users?
After understanding the user, I was tasked with creating a prospective user flow to lead into ways we can help our user Jacob achieve his user goals. By mapping out the user’s path, we can, as a group, decide the best way possible for the users to achieve their goals in the app after initiating the process by opening the application.
Design & Development
Potential Solutions
Users want a flexible learning environment, feedback and interaction → group learning feature.
Users want to spend less time searching → curate personalized selection
Users need to learn "bite size" and flexible sprints → create a mini course plan
Design Process
Beginning the design phase, our group decided to keep key points in mind. We came up with two major tasks for your users;
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Creating personalized learning environment, which we solutionze from the get go with redesign onboarding
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Creating a new feature of group learning.
Sketching out the first ideas that came to mind with regard to the persona I was ideating for was the next step. Giving myself a timebox of 1 hour for the sketches allowed me to begin constructing wireframes to see how the designs could exist on mobile layouts. Through further sketching and review of my data from the user interviews, I began to sketch in features that created possible solutions to the problem while implementing the goals of the user.
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Wireframes to Mid-Fidelity Screens
Focus on Onboarding
My main role within the design phase was to turn my sketches from the onboarding process and turn them into wireframes. Going through the process did reveal difficulties when trying to visualize how Udemy would implement a group learning feature, but the approach I focused on for personalized learning was to customize the experience from the beginning of the application, using the results to propagate the experience for the users as they move through the application.
Once the team decided on the layout in place for how we wanted the process to go, we were able to move into our next process of prototyping and beginning usability testing.
Mid-Fidelity Onboarding Prototype
The initial onboarding consists of two screens, sign in options which will bring a user to “creating an account with minimal information which then leads to the custom process. Going forward, there is an emphasis on personalized learning so our users could spend less time searching for relevant courses and make easier choices. Personalization begins with the ability to add a profile picture. Users can make learning personalized through selection of subject matter, suggested courses, level and time spent learning daily.
Usability Testing: Round 1
We went through a round of usability testing by focusing on a primary goal for the onboarding process. Our primary focus was to get an understanding of how users felt about the implementations and if they provided solutions towards the problems listed for our user persona.
User's Goal for Onboarding:
The user will sign up and create a learning group with 0 errors in under 3 minutes.
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Benchmark based on other mobile onboarding experiences
We were able to have our participants walk through a series of tasks to complete the two goals. We used that data to get qualitative data to put our users emotions into words, while also gaining quantitative data which allowed for us to analyze how our tasks were implemented while leading us to make comparisons for another potential round of testing.
Our data proved to be not so positive giving us some delta marks to review with the explanation of how our features were implemented. We made changes and reflected on the process for another round of usability testing with the same participants.
Usability Testing: Round 2
Due to the scores and results we gained from our first round of testing. We knew that the implementation of the redesign and the new group learning feature were socially accepted by all users and received positive reviews overall. However, the functionality in the first version caused problems with some additional confusion coming from the content writing that existed within the prototype.
Users liked the features and wanted to use them but did not feel as though the process was explained easily. We decided to make some design iterations which led us into a second version of the onboarding process while making some slight visual changes for clarity to the group feature implementation.
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From version 1 to version 2 we dramatically decreased the error rate from 2 to .5
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Although onboarding was meeting a benchmark in the first iteration we reduced it by 1 whole minute making it more efficient for users.
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We asked users to complete a systems usability scale and according to results of version 2 users overall satisfaction, efficiency and functionality increased nearly 30 points to and 84.4.
Usability Testing: Design Iterations
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Users wanted a better explanation of what to expect with Udemy so we implemented a carousel before sign in with brief explanations to provide users with hints.
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Users originally had to scroll for information for group and individual learning, so we removed that and added a modal with more clear content. We also removed the pricing information at this time so that we can focus on the function of onboarding and plan to retest later. Finally, we re- arranged content and card positions to a vertical layout for clarity and better use of space.
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Delivery
The Design Decisions behind the build of our overall build was solely focused on answering our user’s problems with the group customization and onboarding personalization.
The Introduction screens before login
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Give a brief overview of the new features sharing what’s available in personalization and our group feature
Personalized learning process
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Simplify user’s search for preferred products & resolve cognitive overload of overwhelming choices when browsing app
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Modal explanations on the group and individual
choices to clarify what comes with each option
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Bring a level of community and network for users to engage with each other publicly. Or privately in our new study group feature
Group customization
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Specify your groups plan & purpose for those who are interested in joining
Group benefits
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Allowing group creators access to set structure & organization for their group or new users to join a group with rules that will help ythier learning process
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Long term goals in a curriculum plan, supplied with recommended courses filtered by the new onboarding process along with other related content.
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Short term goal implementation, to track progress of the group through weekly task list & daily assignments within the course which was a key outcome desired in our contextual inquiry to validate users growth in skill.
What's Next?
We want to present the option of subscription based payment model for the new study group feature, along with completing a usability test of when to insert payment screens.Compare bounce rate & cart conversion for app when using onboarding redesign vs original structure. Add language options to the onboarding process to specify courses for international students which aligns with udemy’s goal to add users worldwide.