brandendesign

Designing beyond barriers to create a novel new online learning experience

Class Projects by HITRECORD completes the circular ecosystem of a community-driven creative platform that encourages growth, collaboration and creativity – “Learn by Doing.”

Role & Responsibilities
• Design lead, guiding overall design direction
• Design team operations manager
• User research – surveys, interviews, reports
• Product design strategy and deliverables
• UI/visual design asset production (as needed)

Research Phase

To validate the hypothesis that an education product would appeal to our users, I wrote new user surveys, led live interviews and documented institutional knowledge from coworkers, and combined the results with my previous user research documents. It became evident that there was a strong desire from the existing community for a safe, inclusive place to learn new creative skills that they could then use to participate in more collaborative projects with the HITRECORD community.

Competitive Landscape
I performed a comprehensive survey of existing online learning platforms with notations regarding layout, UI features and user journeys to help define how we might differentiate our education product. I also collaborated with team leads throughout the organization to help determine what type of monetization structure would be the most appropriate for users and business needs.

defining the user journey

Design Sprint
The project’s guiding principles were developed with key stakeholders across all departments in a 1-week design sprint:

• Provide a safe environment to try, fail, and receive positive feedback while learning a new skill, mitigating much of the hesitance people have when attempting to learn a new skill.

• Design a platform to support a diverse and enthusiastic pool of teachers, each with a unique style and skill type, by offering a scalable, flexible “classroom” building experiences.

• Foster collaboration within the Class Projects environment that could then be carried over to HITRECORD open community productions.

• Every student will finish their class with a final piece of art to share.

Product Ecosystem
I put a great amount of consideration into how Class Projects creates a circular integration much more than a walled subscription section separate from the core HITRECORD member experience.

Agile & Iterative

Design, Test, Fail, Learn, Repeat …
With each iterative pass, the design team conducted focused and broad testing, gathering feedback and incorporating it into successive rounds.

Novel Interactions

Engaged Learning with New Friends
Students utilize workspace modules for lesson tasks in response to the teacher’s video, while the Channels messaging system encourages collaboration in small groups that stayed the same through each class.

Lesson Workspace Modules
During the shaping of Class Projects, we conceived of new functionality for an experience unlike any other online education platform. Teachers select different workspace modules to create an experience unique to each class.

In each lesson video, students are prompted to create a contribution to the lesson writing text or selecting image, video or audio files.

Learnings and Next Steps

Flexibility In the Process
No two projects are exactly alike, especially on large initiatives like Class Projects. While utilizing a familiar design process I constantly examined our team’s progress, making sure to be flexible for any unforeseen outcomes at each stage. For example, when the teacher management team realized that they needed a sustainable process to on-board and train new teachers in our platform, I conducted a mini-sprint with them to define an initial user journey specific to their cohort.

Future Improvements
While our initial launch of Class Projects received very positive qualitative feedback from subscribers, new subscribers were slowly gaining momentum and we weren’t yet seeing much cross-engagement between Class Projects and the existing HITRECORD project community, which was one of our KPIs. Before we were able to perform a full product assessment of the initial roll-out and execute updates, all development was halted as our acquisition by MasterClass was announced. While the acquisition was great news, I would have liked to continue refining Class Projects to reach the potential that our team strongly believed it could.