My UX strategy leading to improved discovery and onboarding experience.
Setting the Scene
Scaling Business
New hires and actively investing in the B2B product and space.
Siloed Teams
Lack of holistic thinking across the product leading to inconsistent and fragmented experience.
Expanding Globally
Udemy scaling globally with Japanese partnership, Benesse. Localisation investment required.
Opportunities to collaborate, influence and have impact.
1. Service mapping
I led a series of service mapping exercises across product, marketing, customer success and sales on request from VP of Product (B2B) and Vp of Customer Success. This was to surface internal touchpoints, painpoints, gaps and duplication of effort.
(Product, Marketing, Customer Success, Research)
Activities to make progress
- Alignment session.
- ‘As-Is’ customer journey & internal touchpoints.
- Refined session + async.
- ‘To Be’ journey to align on shared objectives and actions.
Outcome: Shared objective to improve admin and learner onboarding and discovery experience. Research actions for data science and UXR to validate assumptions and close open questions.
UX Audit = Current State
Design Sprint = Vision
Velocity = Influence Planning
Aligning the service mapping exercise with yearly planning enabled me to surface key opportunities, connect strategic initiatives, and influence the roadmap by breaking down silos and fostering shared domain understanding across teams.
3. Design Sprint
Objective
Following the UX Audit, I organized a Design Sprint to leverage our insights into the current experience and explore planned initiatives across Discovery & Onboarding, Teams, and Premium. I led the team in shaping a North Star concept that aligned stakeholders and informed roadmap priorities.
Concept
Enhanced discovery experience for our admins and learners.
- Introduction of goals and learner insights.
- Personalised learner homepage.
- Improved admin onboarding and discovery.
Validation
I coached a designer to create and test prototypes on UserTesting.com, ensuring we validated both usability and concept discovery with a targeted L&D audience. The results strengthened confidence in the direction, leading to follow-up research and iteration by the product team once added to their roadmap.
“I would make the overview page more tailored and dynamic depending on my needs.”
“So as we see all sort of stuff to engage with my team, grow with my team, organize my team so that both my team and myself proactively use the platform”
“The website has a good design. Really easy to understand it instantly and to know exactly where to go and what to do next. Very professional look and feel.”
4. Impact
Planning & Phasing
The success of the design sprint led to a number of projects being added to the roadmap. The ideas that we explored influenced product teams across groups.
Admin Dashboard
Hypothesis: Improving the onboarding and discovery experience will lead to increased user adoption and higher engagement rates. Next: personalisation and AI additions.
Beta release.
Over six months we observed an average 18% adoption increase of admin tools in the commercial segment, validating our approach.
Larger organisations didn’t have the same uptake. Our hypothesises is that they use LMS, API’s and their own dashboards to review insights.
Customer success feedback has been very positive to this advancement as it has helped them guide their customers.
Learner Insights
Hypothesis: Improving the onboarding and discovery experience will lead to increased user adoption and higher engagement rates. Next: personalisation and AI additions.
Experiment in Japanese Market.
5.5% adoption
Release to Japanese Market as experiment over 3 months. Learners spent an extra 6 hours on average learning.
Skill Development Loop
Hypothesis: Improving the onboarding and discovery experience will lead to increased user adoption and higher engagement rates. Next: personalisation and AI additions.
Future bet.
5. Insights & Reflections
AI Considerations
Explored how AI and personalisation could evolve discovery and skills development.
Strategic Leadership
Aligned stakeholders around a shared discovery & onboarding objective.
Customer Insight
Learned enterprise adoption required stronger LMS/API integration, shaping future roadmap priorities.
Team Growth
Upskilled designers in design thinking and systems thinking, building knowledge across teams and breaking down silos.
“I am really excited by the design workshops led by Mary around the vision for Admin experience and onboarding. I think design has a really important role to play in creating a vision for all teams to work towards and Mary is in a great position to lead this and do more in this area.”
Director of Product, Enterprise Business
Paula Hatch