Learning Management - Development Plan Redesign
Organizations are constantly trying to provide their employees with opportunities to develop their skillsets and gain experience that will aid them in getting to the next level of their career. Learning and Development teams within our customer organizations felt it was critical to create a more unified experience within our Development Plan feature to add value to the experience and drive adoption by their users.
Teams Involved
Product, UX Design, UX Research, Engineering
Methods
Discovery Sessions | Strategy & Project Management | Design
Kickoff
The UX Designers and myself met with the Product Manager (PM) assigned to the Development Plan Redesign Project. A new feature to be managed by this particular PM, she was excited to really blow it up and start at square one (which is ALWAYS one of my favorite types of projects). We reviewed some of the information she had obtained about pain points and issues users had, but determined a round of Discovery Sessions would be optimal to really get an understanding of how Customer’s were leveraging this within their organizations and for what use cases.
Discovery Sessions
We spoke with 8 organizations about their usage of Development Plans within our system. While most had similar use cases, and therefore similar pain points and requests for changes, we also identified a couple customers that were leveraging the feature for Continuing Education learning rather than development towards an aspirational job or other career goal. Overall, the feedback we gathered was critical in identifying our starting point and what next steps needed to be taken in order to really innovate on the feature offering.
Project Management & Strategy
Once the Discovery Sessions had been completed, we debriefed with Product and identified a number of areas of the application that would benefit from cross-integration and had the potential to drive further adoption. I orchestrated meetings with relevant subject matter experts and led the discussion. Following those meetings, I curated notes and documentation for the designers to consider as they were completing initial designs. My knowledge of other areas of the application, gained through previous studies, proved to be critical in my understanding of this feature and the potential opportunities available.
NEXT STEPS
Concept Validation
The designer is working on completing the first round of designs that we will be completing Concept Validation on. We hope to not only speak with the individuals that participated in our initial discovery sessions, but also some additional customers we know are heavy users of this feature within our application.
Design
Because we were able to take a “blue sky” approach to the redesign, it was important to consider the current feature but not let the existing structure and UI of the page confine us from what could be. The UX designers for this project were a bit junior and I was able to take on a mentoring role for the primary designer. To help push “out of the box” thinking, I contributed design ideas during the initial design iteration process. Based on some previous work that had been being done in other areas of the site, it also considered the most important points of feedback we heard during the Discovery Sessions regarding the complexities of the page.