My UX Design Process

Discovery + RESEARCH

I was not with the company yet when the initial research and discovery took place. But here is the following top insights learners gave during the discovery calls:

• While the time learners are willing to dedicate to a series of coding challenges varies from a few minutes a day to 10 hours per week, there is interest in spaced practice opportunities. 

• “Hands-on practice is important to my learning.”  

• Learners are interested in larger projects, "I've learned something, now I want to build something.”

• “I like to go back and forth between the work I’m doing for my job and learning what I need as efficiently as possible.”

• “I want to see what is coming next.” 

• Learners are used to the table of contents being on the right like in the video course player.

• “I want to be able to resize/collapse the Table of Contents.”

• The more learners can do on one screen, the better. Scrimba (learning platform) stood out to a learner because hands-on doesn't make him leave the video.

Ideate, prototype, + test

While I didn’t do initial sketches & wireframing (a different designer before me did), this is when I joined Pluralsight and took over his work. After some rounds of testing with our learners, my PM & I got together to adjust the ideas based on our learning and I reworked the flows and made them high-fidelity designs. Later on, our company had a major brand refresh that included a new pattern library with new UI and colors. So the prototype you’re seeing has been done completely by me.
I also wanted to point out that the lab in the 3rd slide is not yet fully integrated into the ILX Player, which is why the experience looks a little different. All efforts have been made to make it look as close to the ILX Player experience as possible. Because it’s a cloud lab, the integration is still being worked through, so for now, it links out into a different browser tab. Everything else is served within the ILX Player.

results

601 learners were surveyed once we released the new ILX Player by using Coding Challenges, the very first course on Pluralsight that included not just a video, but also labs, and solution videos:

• “Do you feel this challenge is a valuable way to practice and build your skills?” 91.2% said yes

• “How would you rate the overall quality of the challenge?” 79.2% rated them as above average

MORE REDESIGNS…

Here’s some before and afters of some of the work I did on my ILX team.

Course Details Page. Left is old, right is updated with more features along, with a new pattern library implemented.

End of Module/Course Summary Screen. Left is old, lifeless, and badges appear in a modal. Right is redesigned, added badges to page, along w/ more ways a learner can interact with.

IMPACT

Continual testing has shown that the redesigned Course Details page, ILX Player with an updated Table of Contents, and Module & Course summary pages have led to an increase in the learner end-to-end experience, raising the course completion rate from 20% to 40%!

Next Steps

ILX Player became the Skills Video Courses player; 250+ ACG Courses (ACG, A Cloud Guru, is a cloud-based learning platform that Pluralsight acquired a couple years ago) were imported into ILX Course Builder to be republished using ILX clips, Skills assessments, and ACG labs — ACG integration with Skills, powered by the ILX team. Broader integration of Skills & ACG content is happening next; more capabilities in Course Builder to import & edit ACG courses, Skills Video Courses, but also create entirely new ILX-native content.