It has been said that one of the keys to success is being in the right place at the right time. This is often true in app design. A tremendous amount of value can be added to an experience by making the appropriate information available at just the right time in order to be helpful for the user. This was the underlying intent for this project.
Background
Imagine that you are responsible for the learning program in your organization. You have hundreds of learners enrolled in dozens of courses at any one time. For any given course, you would like to see which learners are enrolled and what their progress is at-a-glance.
Challenge
Previous to this project, an administrator did not have an easy way to access that information. Although there was the ability to cobble together some of the data by running a report in the analytics tool, it proved to be inefficient due to the steep learning curve required to understand the analytics reports. It also did not provide real or near-time data. Furthermore, the administrator lacked means to take action against a set of learners enrolled in a single course.
Setting the Project Goals
- Increase administrative efficiency by providing a view to an administrator that allows them to quickly see enrollment information at the course level.
- Increase learning program engagement by enabling simple tasks that aid in course management and the platform as a whole.
Research & Exploration
The gap between user needs and product feature regarding this particular pain point had been a known issue for quite some time. Customer feedback describing the lack of functionality via support calls was routine. We had an ample amount of anecdotal data at our disposal. We also interviewed multiple customers to determine their process and workflows.
We wanted to make sure that the solution we created solved the right problems for the largest segment of our user base.
We plotted customer pain points against known feature gaps to determine severity, value, and customer impact.
We did derive one key learning from our customer interviews that had not previously surfaced. A common data point that the majority of customers wanted was to know when the learner was last active in a course. Based on that information, they would know who to include in their outreach and engagement activities.
Design Solutions
The majority of the UI across the Northpass LMS platform consists of information displayed in data table format. We knew that just providing a list of names — the learners enrolled in a course — would add value. Including more data points along with the names would also be helpful. We wanted the admin to be able to answer these questions about a course:
How many learners are enrolled? Which learners are enrolled? When were they enrolled? How were they enrolled? What is their progress?
As design lead, I wanted to design the data in a way that visually enhanced the data, added a level of richness to the content, and allowed for at-a-glance evaluation.
We decided to add a completely new view to the course page with the following columns: Learner Name, Learner Email, Date Enrolled, Last Active Date, and Course Progress. We also added a series of data cards at the top of the table a way to quickly view high-level enrollment-related metrics about a specific course.
Since this view is a data table, it allows the admin to take advantage of sorting and filtering, which can provide multiple ways to observe and manage learners enrolled in a course.
Outcomes
Measuring the Results
One key metric we tracked to determine the success of this project was Time to Value.
Quantitative
A preliminary measurement suggests a decrease of 84% in Time to Value for this particular task. This was calculated by measuring the time required to display a list of learners enrolled in a given course and view their progress.
Qualitative
Qualitative results were learned via user interviews and feedback sessions. After launching the new feature, user feedback confirmed our assumptions that this new functionality would allow admins to work more efficiently. Admins experienced time savings comparing the previous workflow to the new Enrollments View — the amount of effort required to gather the same level of information about a course. Admins also verbalized their satisfaction with the new view, citing the ability to drive engagement in their learning program by affording a number of data points and actions that were not previously available all in one place.
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project due to the clear line of sight that was visible to me between the customer’s pain point and a solution. It is always fun when you can plainly see your decisions lead to improvement in software that helps real people. In this case, admins are now able to do their jobs easier. They have accurate information about a course at their fingertips and are able to make decisions with confidence, which makes them better at their job, enhances their learning program, and adds value to their organization.
