Company:
Pluralsight Channels
About
Pluralsight is a SaaS subscription based company with over 18,000 corporate clients (B2B) and over 1 million individual subscription users (B2C) focused on technical training. As the product designer over the content curation team I was responsible for designing multiple parts of the web application including Pluralsight’s Paths, Role IQ, and Channels. A Channel is a collection of content a business user or an individual user can organize their learning objectives.
Project goals
Design Criteria
My Role:
Product Designer
Our B2B managers did not have a way to assign content with a due date to their company channels track progress and team member learning as well as the ability to delete channels.
They needed a clear and intuitive way to administer their company channels such as adding a due date onto a channel to ensure their team members were completing course work, promote career growth and learning objectives within the organization and ability to delete and assign their team members to a channel they created. This required me to work on adding a new card design component to our design system.
At Pluralsight we used Aha! to collect feature requests for each part of the product to determine where to focus. Adding due dates was highly requested from many of our users with an anticipated revenue tied to this feature of over $15.1 million.
Create a clear way for managers to add a due date to a channel to track learning progress
Add in analytics for managers to measure their team members learning goals and objectives
Ensure the learner can see the new due date on the learner experience.
Add new design system card components to Pluralsight’s design system.
How I contributed
Completed all the designs and user research for the product
Created all wireframes, mockups, and prototypes and conducted all user interviews and synthesized research.
Worked cross functionally with 6 software engineers, and a product manager.
Added new card components to Pluralsight’s design system.
My design process
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Interview users to get a better understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. Create personas to understand user pain points.
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Create site map, user flows, sketches and basic low-fidelity wireframes.
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Create high-fidelity designs, style guide, prototype, stakeholder reviews and gather user feedback.
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Conduct user interviews and user testing to test live prototype and gather additional feedback.
Research & Define
We started out the project with our generative research phase. I interviewed core users and stakeholders that entered in request via Aha! asking for this feature request.
Research Goals:
Understand the overall usability of due dates and admin functionality from a manger and admin perspective.
Test the usability of new Channel Admin page
Can users locate the channel admin page?
Can users assign members via the channel admin page?
Does it make sense how to add due dates from the channel admin page?
Do users understand how to remove and adjust due dates?
Do users understand how to delete channels?
User Persona / Who are we designing for?
B2B: Managers from organizations that are our clients that create company channels for their employees
B2C: Learners that will see the due dates and channel details that the admin users have set.
Ideate
After conducting user interviews I started organizing the information architecture of the experience by creating a site map and user flows. I also started created low fidelity mocks to play around with different layouts, etc.
Design
After going through a lot of brainstorming and ideation on layout and how we wanted to approach this problem I narrowed down the solution to creating a separate admin page where the users would navigate to add due dates. However, after our first round of testing this did not test well so I changed the design to be within the same experience and ended on this for the final design.
Design System Contribution
I worked cross functionally with members from the Design System team and the Home team to create a new component we added to the Pluralsight design system.
Test
Once we had the first initial designs established, I created a prototype to test out the process for adding a due with our admin users to ensure it was a fluid easy process to follow.
Below is the testing script I created that I used to conduct 10 one-on-one user interviews with our clients.
Reflection
After conducting user interviews I gathered all the research and iterated over my designs changing a few things based on our key findings listed below. Then I did another round of 5 additional interviews and synthesized all my research shown below. As you can see from the results below the admin page did not test well so this made me go back to iterating on my design and ended up with a different solution than we started with that tested really well with our users.
After the final round of research was conducted and proved well the product was sent onto development.
The new card component was embedded into the design system and used by Pluralsight’s product desgns and is now live on www.pluralsight.com/channels today.
The admin feature was still in development stages when I left the company but should be implemented for admins soon. I was not able to gather evaluative research on the admin feature before I left since it was still in development but the plan was to send out survey requests to gather additional feedback.