FutureLearn wanted to increase the number of courses on the platform to keep up with the volume of courses offered by competitors. Our goal was to scale and speed up our production process as it hampered our ability to create courses quickly.
In a team made up of a PM, 5 engineers and a user researcher, I led the design and research for this project, improving the backend admin tools, and introducing service design thinking to ensure that as we introduce product changes we also consider the impact on the wider service.
3 months
User research
Information architecture
UX/UI
Service design
After observing FutureLearn admins navigate the course creation process, I created a service blueprint and found that a lot of their time was spent supporting university partners as the platform wasn't doing enough. This back-and-forth communication was delaying course from being published and stopped admins from focusing on creating higher quality courses.
We believed that radically reimagining the process would be more impactful than just simplifying it. I ran a sprint to quickly design and test the desirability of these changes. This approach helped us work closely with engineers and stakeholders to identify risks early and make sure that we delivered radical changes within feasible constraints.
During the design sprint, we simplified the user journey to help FutureLearn admins gather all the necessary information from partners up front and remove the back and forth communication between them. As part of this, we also explored offering a self-service model to help us scale without relying on our admins to continually support every university partner.
A major cause of delays was partners’ uncertainty about course requirements. We addressed this by providing them with a clearer overview and a checklist to track their progress. Testing showed that this helped partners feel more confident and reduced their need for admin support. This freed our admins' time to focus on improving course quality and increasing course volume.
To publish a course, university partners had to complete lengthy forms with no preview option, leading to errors and extra admin work. We considered removing forms and using contextual input, but it slowed the process and frustrated experienced users. Instead, I collaborated with developers to create a toggle between edit and preview modes. This performed better, allowing users to spot and correct mistakes before publishing.
Previously we were asking redundant questions and only receiving 80% of the content needed for course creation. By collaborating with my product manager and FutureLearn admins, we streamlined the forms to gather 100% of the required information. This removed the need for admins to chase partners for missing details, leading to faster publication of higher-quality courses.
Our radical approach to simplifying the workflow gave significantly more autonomy to university partners by enabling them to self publish their courses. However, when tested, this didn’t perform well with FutureLearn admins due to the increased risk of poorer quality courses. While self-service is still the long term goal, I solved this by suggesting a new strategy that as an interim step introduced platform guidance at every step to give our partners greater confidence and autonomy, while reducing workload for the FutureLearn admins.
A more streamlined course production experience that gives partners more autonomy to create a course and help FutureLearn scale without putting pressure on our admins to support every university partner.
The new self-service model led to a 41% decrease in support tickets and 89% partner satisfaction rate. More importantly, it halved the amount of time it takes to create a course, resulting in 4x more courses on FutureLearn.