Course Building Process Design
How Everfi creates impactful learning experiences.
Role
IA Design
Flow Design
User Research and Interviews
Cross-functional Collaborators
Content (Learning Experience)
Visual Design
Implementation Specialist (Dev)
A11y
QA
Product and Project managers
Overview
A visual map that helps multidisciplinary teams at Everfi understand the course build process, help identify gaps, pain points, and bottlenecks, create efficiencies, and establish a common language across teams. This was done through researching processes across functional teams to document the order of operations and dependencies and make recommendations for process improvement to Product leadership.
Solution approach
How it starteD
As UX design lead, I started this as a passion project to help myself and my team better understand:
What does the course building UX process look like?
How do we work together with stakeholders?
Who do we communicate with, when, and why?
As a first step, I wanted to clearly understand how the UX team designs a course, and the different steps it takes to do so.
This journey led me down a different path than I had originally intended and evolved into an artifact that could help our team clearly understand what deliverables they needed from UX, which parts of the process needed improved communication, and where stakeholders felt their voice needed to be amplified. I followed this by wanting to understand the collaboration relationship between the UX team and other stakeholders.
UX Collaboration Relationship
How it’s going
During this discovery period, I interviewed UX team members and the research led me to interview other key stakeholders (Product Managers, QA, Visual Design, A11y, Content, Developers, and Implementation Specialists), and this gave me both a wider lens and a much clearer understanding and overview of the course process.
Course Building Overview
One two three, iterate
After interviewing 16 different people over the course of 5 weeks, I was able to visualize the entire process, nose to tail, and capture the voices of the 8 functional teams across the entire product build process. This allowed me to better understand each development phase, and how they connected to each other.
A key finding in this study was the discovery that because we make modular products, our process is often a mixture of waterfall and agile. Each phase is dependent on the previous one, but each module of the larger build can also be worked on independently. What this means is that while we are doing discovery work on the last module, the first module could be ready to launch.
Our main process phases are; Discovery, Development, Launch, and Iterate.
Course Building Flow
Methods and output
The research findings guided me to create a flow that documented and defined the different stages of the product development cycle, along with entity relationships to show how one artifact or process leads to, informs, or is dependent on other artifacts and processes. It also enables us to identify efficiencies or bottlenecks.
This artifact has helped the Product team identify and avoid bottlenecks, find opportunities for efficiency, and give a general understanding and overview to different stakeholders of what our course building process looks like.
Course Building Detailed Flow
Discovery
The discovery process allows us to build the right thing, not what we think is right. Through this process, we can research, explore the topic, identify our target audience, the learning objectives that allow us to create our personas, and a content outline. This kicks off a collaborative process that generates the outputs we need to move forward to the development phase. It also enables us to have a refined execution plan and can help minimize bottlenecks during subsequent phases.
Phase 1: Discovery
Development
The development phase can be streamlined when the discovery process is robust. This development phase is boots on the ground for all functional teams. During this phase, each stakeholder executes their respective deliverables such as module scripts, proof of concept prototypes, wireframes, visual themes, final assets, voiceovers, etc. Each of these is then used by the implementation specialists to build the course on the platform.
Phase 2: Development
Launch & Iteration
By the launch phase, each team should have finalized its deliverables. At this point, a limited release provides user feedback, which we leverage into finishing touches and enhancements before a general availability release.
Phase 3: Launch
Nothing is ever perfect the first, second, or even third time around, and that is ok.
After the course is released there is an opportunity for improvement. This is where known issues get fixed, we can implement new or planned features or make planned roadmapped improvements and the cycle starts all over again.
Iteration process
What’s next?
This artifact has kept evolving in the past year and it has inspired other teams to make similar documents from their department’s perspectives. I have been collaborating with and guiding those teams to define their own internal processes, as well as updating mine as we find new efficient ways to work.
C&E Collaboration Relationship
Final thoughts
Each course is different and smaller courses might not go through each step, but they have gone through it at one point. This is an iterative process.
What makes it agile and waterfall is that we do need to discover, develop then launch, but all 3 processes can be happening at the same time.
A delightful surprise was that as I was discovering and developing and getting ready to share this process with a border audience, I was following the same following the process itself. This was a very meta moment for me.