eLearning Made Intuitive

A constant evolution of branding across the Experts Exchange platform had left Cloud Class pages behind. Management simply wanted to update course pages to match the current branding, while Marketing wanted to add more enticing courses to bump metrics. That would be too easy.

Being denied time to conduct user research myself, I reached out to customer support. From multiple support conversations, I found that users were disenchanted with online course offerings for a variety of reasons:

• Awareness: Many trial members and subscribers didn’t know their subscription offered online courses due to a lack of marketing, no onboarding, and limited navigation.
• Organization: Subscribers that were aware of the online courses found it difficult to locate the courses they were seeking. Some courses might span multiple categories but were only available in one. Users seeking to learn new technologies didn’t know where to start.
• Mismatch: Where subscribers did align with management was branding. The question and answer platform was primarily dark grey and white with minimal blue accents. Users were unsure if they were still on the same website or using a different service.
• Helplessness: Despite online courses being featured on a question and answer platform, there was no FAQ or easy way to get help during courses. Subscribers were forced to search the platform or post a question to a public that may or may not have seen the course material.

Once I was armed with my findings from the Customer Support team, I approached management again. I reminded them that we are not the users and that no matter how nice the pages looked, it wouldn’t matter if the subscribers couldn’t find what they were looking for. I was granted a brief window to discuss course organization with subscribers.

Before jumping into redesign, it was important to acknowledge that not all pages needed to be recreated. The original course library forced users into a scavenger hunt almost entirely based on clicking and the search bar queried the entire platform, not just courses. Additionally, even if a potential subscriber found the course landing page, there was no way to see what courses were available if they did subscribe.

As a team, we aligned on a more simplified approach that traded 10 unique layouts for 5 layouts with 4 screens trading out specific components depending on the user. Subscribers would have full access while unauthenticated users would see partial content and calls to subscribe.

This wasn’t the time to reinvent and Cloud Class was nothing new, so I analyzed the layouts of several larger e-learning platforms to search for commonalities. Page layouts fluctuated greatly, but the way courses were presented were largely the same.

Time was up and screens were pushed into development having only gone through internal testing. I was nervous until a customer left feedback for the old pages that solidified almost every change I had advocated for, “I'll be honest. I don’t like the Training Courses look and feel. I prefer the LinkedIn ability to add courses to saved, collections, learning history, skills and in progress. It's just easier to use for myself.”

I wanted to shout, “I hear you!” from the rooftops. Thankfully our Support team assured the member that most of these features were in development and would be released soon.

While members were fairly quiet, Google Analytics was not. Turns out, the changes improved time on page over 270%, reduced bounces by 16%, and resulted in more online courses being started. One employee remarked, “Just went to find some courses. What a difference! I was like, wow, this is so easy… was cool to actually use.”

Course completion was another issue, as updates to the course interface were placed in the backlog. The third-party content was segmented in ways that forced users to apply more effort than other platforms. Unable to source better content, our partnership with the course provider came to an end a year later, and Cloud Class was sunset in favor of a partnership with Udemy.