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Redesigning the end-to-end experience for higher ed instructors
Cengage asked me to rethink and redesign the user experience for all prospective and current higher education customers who were looking for learning products to user in their classroom—their most valuable customers. The current experience had many issues and was out of sync with how users research, decide and manage their learning courseware.
Project Details
My Role
As the Lead UX Designer, I partnered with the product manager to plan the UX strategy, then created a research and design plan, Using a lean approach of build, measure, learn, the first phase of the redesign was completed in 6 weeks.
Results
Initial redesign complete, and to be fully implemented in Spring 2020.
The challenge
The current Cengage Instructor Resource Center–where college instructors go to find new digital courseware and manage their Cengage courses–was outdated and had become a "catch all" for too many features, causing usability issues and undermining the users' ability to accomplish their work. For Cengage's most important customer segment, the user experience was being ranked the worst among its competitors.
"We just need to make it easy to use"....is NOT a research insight, design principle, or a design strategy.
Usability is not product design
Customer support data, usability testing, and a heuristic review clearly showed that the current Instructor home had critical usability issues that were causing users to call customer support, be frustrated, and to avoid the interface altogether, and the initial request from the product team to "redesign the home experience to make it easier to use."
However, user experience is not the same as usability, so I proposed that we first take steps to do some discovery user research, in order to make sure we understood what problem we were trying to solve, i.e., who is coming here and what they are trying to accomplish.
Legacy Designs
Product buried in a too-long dropdown field and irrelevant and repetitive search results were just the tip of the iceberg from a long neglected user experience.
Creating data-driven user personas
I created provisional personas based on our first round of discovery research. We decided to focus on these 2 main users.
"White Glove" Instructors
"DIY" Instructors
“If the publisher doesn’t work with us and set up my courses, I wouldn’t take the time to dowork for them.”
"I like to dig in and play around."
Representing the most revenue, the career professor who may not be very comfortable with digital technology, or may not want to waste time learning new interfaces. They expect “white glove” service from learning consultants who act as a personal assistant, handling product selection, training, course delivery and setup.
The most dynamically growing segment, these instructors know what they want, have a do it yourself attitude and expect to be able to quickly find what they need. They have specific needs and customizations.
Discovery Process: Understanding the Problem
We ran moderated user interviews with 14 Cengage Instructors to better understand who our primary users were, how our they felt about their current experience with Cengage and other publishers, and what they were trying to accomplish. I created a wiki site for the team to track the UX research and design process, aligned Ux tasks with project goals, and to contribute questions to the research.
Prioritizing Use Cases
The team worked together to sort the use cases and chose the top 3 according to our most important users and the what would have the most impact on our business goals. Based on these decisions, I created the first round of designs which were reviewed, refined, then tested.
User Testing Initial Redesign
We conducted user testing with 10 customers both in-person and remotely. Then, we also conducted several design reviews/critiques to mature the concept.
Design insights lead to new business strategy
Feedback from users and stakeholders informed the next round of designs and inspired me to propose a plan to drive users to the site by incorporating
the existing communication channels between instructors and learning consultants (happening exclusively in emails and attachments) into the Instructor home screen which became a business goal for v.2.
Iterate, test, evaluate
I did several more iterations of the design incorporating feedback from each round of testing. Weekly stakeholder reviews ensured we were tracking with business and technical goals.
Final design
The designs for the first phase of the release were completed, tested and built.
