Redesigning an online course platform
Overview:
TechChange's online course platform trains professionals in the technology and social change sector who specialize in public health, emergency response, and monitoring and evaluation. TechChange's facilitated courses focus on connecting humanitarian experts together and providing flexibility for professionals with busy schedules. The tech team planned to migrate the course platform out of Wordpress to launch a new course platform. My role was to lead the redesign the course platform, from ideation and content strategy to prototyping.
Process:
Research: Stakeholder interviews, Survey, Competitive Analysis
Content Strategy: Sitemaps, Task Analysis, Design Studio
User Interface design: Wireframe, Clickable prototype, High fidelity mockups
Tools:
Sketch 3, InVision, Balsamiq
User Research
Conducting Stakeholder interviews
Interviewed TechChange's founders, instructional designers, course facilitators and marketing team to:
Learn about online student engagement best practices (linear vs. exploratory learning)
Prioritize and evaluate platform features
Understand past practices and limitations
Analyzing Course Evaluation Surveys
Analyzed 190+ course evaluation surveys from course alumni to map out user values and pain points to existing features and improvements.
Social Learning & Community
“Biggest value is their people and the way you can connect with the people via a remote setting.”
“I have tried online courses before but the lack of community, saw my attention drift. The constant communication and discussions as well as the gaming element (points) really got me into this.
Sense of progress
“The only thing I would add maybe is a way to track your progress: mark what you've already read, which videos watched, what's missing. It was sometimes difficult for me to remember where I stopped and what I still need to read because I didn't manage to visit the platform as regularly as I hoped.”
time flexibility
“The learning platform was ideal for busy professionals' self-learning. I like having the flexibility of completing a course at my own pace. ”
“Due to time zone differences, it was difficult for me to attend most of the live events.”
Competitive analysis
How should students transition from one lesson to the next?
TechChange’s current course layout displays all lessons within a collapsible, tabbed structure.
Content Strategy
In collaboration with the developers, the site map was created to prioritize the pages and understand the structure of the new platform.
wireframing
Through design studios and rounds of internal feedback, the layouts were further defined and translated into wireframes and a clickable prototype.
