Allowing managers to track learner progress.
Context
The mission at General Assembly is to help people find the work they love. To that end, they offer in-person and remote classes in a variety of subjects. Recently, GA has made a push towards providing education in the enterprise space as well.
The enterprise side of the business in simple. A client purchases a product from GA for a subset of their employees. The employees then interact with the learning content via an online platform.
The employer helps foster a culture of learning in the workplace. The employee adds to their own skill set. It’s a win-win.
problem
In the current model, clients rely on an internal GA employee to add/remove users, keep employees engaged, and provide valuable insights, which is:
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Costly: Loss of numerous smaller clients who can afford this additional service
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Annoying: Current larger clients that must wait for these tasks to be done for them
goal
Design a solution for clients that allows them, on their own, to:
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Manage their team by handling the day-to-day tasks
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Set the pace of the assignments and encourage learners
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Gain insights into how their employees are performing
Users
Client-side team managers
Loss of numerous smaller clients who can afford this additional service​
Engagement Managers
Internal GA users who are managing multiple (usually larger) clients. Many of the same needs that exist for client managers overlap with engagement managers.
process
Design Sprint
A chance to define problem as a team and explore potential solutions. A group of 8 of us came together for a week of user interviews, sketching and prototyping.
MVP Approach
Out of this design sprint, we finalized the requirements and ideas for an MVP. This allowed us to build and ship quickly, include the most important features, and learn from user behavior.
Post MVP
We were able to look at usage of the MVP and talk to more external users to continue to learn about their needs. We discovered some core insights and were able to clarify the requirements for our V2 feature.
V2
V2 places the emphasis on progress, solving the biggest need of the users. At a glance from the overview tab, users can see how their team is progressing through each assignment.
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Assignments also include an editable due date, allowing users to set the pacing as desired for their team (and change it as things come up).
The participants tab, which includes the team roster and the invite participants action, is moved to the last tab as its importance diminishes after the initial invitations are sent.
Challenges and Next Steps
The design sprint was a big win that helped spur collaboration and motivate the team - we were all on the same page.
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The MVP was released and served 25 different clients. From this release, we were able to learn typical behavior regarding user management and which of the downloadable reports were most often used (extremely valuable).
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After talking to users, it became more clear what the common needs were and what needed to be addressed first (progress and assessment scores).