Udemy Personal Plan

Context

As one of the most popular MOOC's, Udemy ↗ has a large variety of online courses— yet the service struggles with overall retention and course completion. While taking a Udemy course, I fell into the same slump. This led me to challenge myself to create a solution for me and the millions of Udemy learners.
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As a Product Designer, I introduced a hypothetical solution to reduce decision fatigue and automate day-to-day coursework, similar to learning in a traditional classroom setting, but in the comfort of your home. Product Designer

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

Jun - Aug 2023

Disciplines

Interaction Design

Visual Design

Content Strategy

Team

Individual

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

Jun - Aug 2023

Team

Individual

Why a personal project?

As a budding designer, I took online courses to hone the fundamentals. However, the course structure made me feel unaccomplished unless I finished an entire section daily, leading to burnout from studying for long hours.

I gave myself 10 weeks to design a few feature, while mimicking Udemy design guidelines, to address the long standing retention issue. Simulating the internship experience.

DISCOVERY RESEARCH

Quick statistics

Udemy has low retention and course completion rates while being one of the most popular learning platforms. It is not an anomaly in the online course space.

97%

course drop off rate

30%

course content completion

course completion rate

Platform’s emphasize courses

most platforms put an emphasis on course search-ability, credibility, and outcomes to allow learners to find quality courses that fit their interests. I wanted to focus on the environment courses are taken in and understand how to create an ideal online learning environment.

PROBLEM SCOPE

How might we make the environment surrounding online courses more engaging and supportive?

HUMAN DISCOVERY

Main pillars of my research

Completion

Understand what makes students drop out of a course before completing.

Consistency

Quantify what is blocking students from consistently learning and building a habit.

Support

Determine what types of support students benefit from when learning.

KEY INSIGHT

As the course went on, students struggled with motivation

Why did users struggle?

In the beginning, motivation was high. However, students struggled to stay motivated as they dug deeper into a course. This problem lead to students dropping off as the course seemed endless and troublesome. Below are specifics gathered from users.

Decision fatigue/ boredom

Difficulty managing long courses and lack of necessity to know the entire course which causes the student to lose enjoyment and generally procrastinate learning.

Time management

Most students that take courses carry many greater responsibilities. Students had challenges maintaining motivation and managing their time effectively to stay on track.

“I did not stay on track with my course work. After the first few days, I sorta lost interest and then I drastically fell off.”

- Christian

Community support

Students often struggled to fully understand content and appreciated the value of learning communities (Discord and Slack) to provide instructional and emotional support.

All this boils down to...

Students lacked short term goals and support.

How does this shape the product?

With this insight, I realized that honing into a solution with an emphasis on automation, short term goals, and support resources was important. Therefore it would incentivize the user to build consistency while watching the progress slowly accumulate.

CURRENT SOLUTION

Udemy’s current attempt

Udemy recognized the low retention rates of it’s courses and implemented features to promote habit building. I think that these features are a good start, but there is room for improvement.

Streak Tracker

Users didn’t find much benefit from tracking weekly watch time. It wasn’t particularly motivating nor did it help them build consistency.

Learning Time

While blocking a time and duration to learn can be useful, the feature doesn’t integrate into Udemy and doesn’t account for individuals who don’t organize their day down to the hour.

DESIGN IDEATION

Looking at the iterative process

Through iterating on my design, I was focused on conveying necessary information while maintaining clarity and maximizing flexibility for the user. Below are some explorations on various elements.

Home interface explorations

Personal Plan interface consists of two elements. A prominent window displaying course name, work and progress and a goal window documenting daily and weekly consistency.

Coursework view

At first, I designed the window to display all the lessons the student needed to accomplish. However I realized that the information displayed was overwhelming and students valued the number of courses rather than knowing each course name. I modified the design to be easily legible containing only the start → end and the number of courses.

Goal window

I wanted Personal Plan to have minimal development to market time, so I had initially planned to implement their existing streak window. However, I wanted the card to convey more information regarding weekly progress. Therefore I designed a dedicated goal window to properly convey short-term and long-term consistency.

Implementation explorations

Incentivizing users to try a Personal Plan is one of the most crucial steps. I wanted to maximize visibility without sacrificing flexibility. Below are some iterations that I went through.

On course signup

While it increased visibility, it lacked flexibility even with an option to ignore the Personal Plan. It makes finding the ideal course more troublesome which is not my intention.

The Learning Tools tab

Compared to forcing the user to interact with Personal Plan, this option is much more flexible, but it lacks visibility. This solution is much less intrusive and could still be implemented as a secondary entry point.

Popup after finishing introduction

Using a popup allowed me to gently present the feature at the right time. I choose to present the feature after the user finishes the introduction section to give the user plenty of time to determine the course’s fit. It also introduces the feature when the user is motivated and will therefore enable a higher engagement rate. This option maximized visibility and flexibility and therefore became the primary entry point.

CONSTRAINTS & RESULTS

Adapting to a short timeline

Due to the project having a short timeline, I was unable to build a functioning product to perform a long term usability study. Instead I allowed users to give me their honest opinion on the functionality while backing the longterm success with psychology.

100%

User satisfaction

12/12 users believed that Personal Plan would increase their motivation to learn and help them stay on track. Many users reported that they already instinctually blocked off time to learn.

Short term goals increase motivation

Any accomplishment, no matter how small, releases the neurotransmitter dopamine which boosts your mood, motivation and attention. It also signals you to keep doing the activity again and again.

Reducing decision-making boosts mood

The brain closely monitors the body's energy during prolonged decision-making. When energy is low, the brain conserves by limiting functions, including the prefrontal cortex responsible for complex decisions. This can lead to irrational behaviors, poor choices, and quitting prematurely. Thus, it's not just a bad attitude that can hinder goal achievement, but also our brain's energy-conserving responses.

REFLECTION

Looking back on the journey

Designing a feature for a established platform is challenging

Designing the feature to be impactful is a task in it self, but we also need to consider how the feature fits in the existing platform.

Uncovering edge cases

Design a perfect experience for one user and then scale something close to other users and the users themselves will help uncover edge cases.

Finding balance between business and user needs

As a product designer, we are often told to prioritize user needs. While this is true, we cannot forget about how design decisions can impact the health and longevity of the business.