TIME: 1 YEAR
TEAM: SENIOR UX LEAD (MYSELF), VISUAL DESIGNER, CLIENT DESIGN MANAGER, CLIENT PRODUCT MANAGER, CLIENT CORE DEV TEAM, CLIENT SMES
SCOPE: CLIENT CULTURE CHANGE / PRODUCT MANAGEMENT COLLABORATION, RESEARCH, PROTOTYPING, UI DESIGN, VALIDATION
Kaplan, a global leader in professional education, faced experience challenges across multiple new and existing product lines and related software solutions being used by financial, educational, and other professional institutions across the world. Negative reviews and online discussions about recent product updates prompted quick action.
In addition to providing user research and design solutions, I helped guide and shift culture within internal product and design teams at Kaplan Professional, which were suffering from a lack of user involvement and poor cross-team communication. We developed and successfully evangelized a product design process that was collaborative among Kaplan teams, user-driven in priority and scope of features, and evidence-based in terms of success. We researched, created, validated, and delivered a measurably improved experience for learners.
KEY POINTS
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Fully understanding user tasks and goals around the whole process of preparing for an exam, not just within our software, was key. Great service experiences solve problems that exist in real life across multiple channels and environments, not just within a screen. We had to understand separate print, classroom, mobile and web behaviors in order to create the right solutions.

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Users are great at making demands for features (or to bring back a feature, as was the case here). They do this because they have a goal, but can't achieve it due to obstacles in the way. As designers and product managers, it’s our job to not just hear the feedback, but also understand the goals and obstacles so we can create solutions that go above and beyond what users expect.
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Process changes can be tough for an established organization. Making a great user experience is the job of more than just the design team, and creating a new culture for design can cause change to other team’s rituals and processes. Start small, be inclusive, and show value to teams. The client team we worked with fundamentally changed how they approach design as a department, and were approved to hire more UX researchers and designers as a result of the value we were able to show.
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RESULTS
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25% increase in activity completion vs. the same point in time last year

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28% reduction in customer support calls vs. the same point in time last year

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Learners who complained about the previous year’s changes were interviewed about the new solution. They found the new design to solve their key concerns, and expressed they would be willing to come back to Kaplan now that it’s available, sharing their email address to receive notifications about the product launch.
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The client team we worked with fundamentally changed how they approach design as a department, and were approved to hire more UX researchers and designers as a result of the value we were able to show.
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DISCOVERY
Meeting with Kaplan’s design manager, I documented the initial information about user and business goals, current known problems, and constraints. We went over the way the design team had been working with other departments and the risks of building without user involvement.
We identified the need to create and communicate a new design process that would help internal staff to understand how our approach would differ from the way things had been done in the past. We established an agreement that our work should be solely focused around solving real problems our users have (both within our software and the larger world), and that we should allow insights from user research to guide our priorities and prove the value of our work.
I came up with an initial draft of the process, including alignment workshops, research steps, opportunity mapping, solution workshops, prototyping, and user validation exercises. We shared the process with the product and project managers, then with C-level execs within Kaplan.
I held a workshop together with Kaplan developers and product managers to create a noun map of existing Kaplan products, user types, software, and data sources, so that we could better understand as a team what capabilities and constraints we were working with. I reviewed existing analytics, data, and prior research efforts.
I drafted proto-personas collaboratively with product line stakeholders for each product line, which focused on how learners differ, what they are trying to accomplish and what obstacles are in their way, to help guide our research and solutions.In order to make it clear what success would mean for us, I facilitated goals workshops with each product line. Establishing experience, business, and product goals helped to define and be prepared to measure success.
ANALYSIS & INSIGHTS
Creating a plan together with the product manager and design manager, we agreed to interview learners and validate some of our assumptions, as well as learn more about their goals and obstacles. We also decided to interview some internal staff and admin users who monitor student performance and handle student questions.
I interviewed a total of 35 users across 6 product lines. We spoke with both end-users (employees at institutions using the learning products) and client admins using a portal to measure student performance and progression. This was a global effort. We interviewed users in the United States, Kuwait, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We gathered information about what learners face in terms of content, classrooms, employer expectations, and personal goals.
We determined that learners primarily struggled with finding enough time to study, starting to study too late, knowing how much to study by when, and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content.
Learners did not feel the current solutions helped them to address these problems. In fact, a recent update to the software had removed a feature that helped with planning, which users found very valuable. Having detailed 1:1 conversations with real learners allowed us to understand the underlying needs and concerns that caused them to value the feature.
We also asked about where students study or find time to study, what those environments are like, and what tasks they are thinking about at different times of the day, which enabled us to create focused print and mobile app opportunities.
I used these insights to update our personas, then created experience maps to help the team visualize and understand the actions, thoughts, and pain points users experience as they go through their tasks, so that we could collaborate on the most important improvements and new features needed.
I created experience maps using the research insights that showed the tasks, thoughts, feelings of users as they prepare for an exam over a long term. I held collaborative workshops with various product lines to brainstorm and prioritize opportunities that solve for pain points in the experience. Having better understood the problem, we realized that we needed more than just a re-introduction of an old feature to make a great experience. Instead, we sought to address the key obstacles we have discovered that lay in the path of learner goals.
SOLUTIONS
We developed our solution hypothesis for learners - People who struggle with finding time for exam prep will benefit from an experience that revolves around flexible but structured weekly assignments, along with a clear indicator of being ahead of or behind an ideal pace. We strove to bring this time vs. content solution to the forefront of the app experience, making the list of activities not just an optional list of things to do without reference, but a front and center plan for finishing the content in time for the exam, which is always the focus of the experience.
For learners, who often study from books or other resources in addition to the online materials, we used the insights to create a more flexible study plan with a pace indicator for how much a user has accomplished vs. how much they need to do before the exam.
Solving for user pain points around studying for exams required a multi-channel solution, so we worked with the Kaplan mobile team to bring key improvements to the mobile app, as well as staff responsible for printed materials to help make the new online planner more discoverable from print materials.
I facilitated collaborative story mapping and sketching workshops with the design, product, and instructional teams to come up with ideas and begin to create an experience we were aligned on. We each took a few minutes to understand the challenge, do some independent solution writing, and then sketch one of our solution ideas. Each member presented to the team and received questions from the team.
I worked with the team to consolidate our best ideas, prioritize them according to what would have the most impact vs. development effort, and create prototypes we could test with real users.
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We delivered:
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A redesigned dashboard experience with many new features around content planning and pace
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An improved content reading and browsing experience
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An improved exam taking experience, taking print exams as well as online exams into account
VALIDATION
Once our concept become more clear, we began testing it in prototype form via ongoing research and validation interviews. We ran a series of 1:1 sessions with learners to hear from them what they are faced with, have them use our proposed solution, and validate whether the experience was improved.
This allowed us to prove that users found value, as well as to squash any usability or content issues. I did this every few weeks during the design process to ensure we were going to be successful, and shared results with the whole team along the way in the form of presentations and stakeholder Q+A. We broke solutions down into epics and stories with the product manager. I ran collaborative design workshops to address new opportunities or challenges along the way.
 I created high fidelity mockups and design system documentation along with the visual designer, so that we could give clear direction to developers.
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