Case study
Redesigning MongoDB’s online learning application
Overview.
MongoDB University offers free online courses with exercises, videos, and labs curated and taught by MongoDB employees. Over 1 million students from all over the world sign up to strengthen their knowledge of MongoDB’s technology. It’s beloved by developers interested in learning NoSQL and is one of the most important user acquisition tools for MongoDB.
The goal of the project was to address design debt and redesign the UI to be more informative and intuitive so that users could easily navigate and complete courses.
My role
I was the first dedicated designer to work on the MongoDB University team. This meant I had to build the design process and foundational research from the ground up. I facilitated user-centered discussions around features, the design process, user feedback, and design implementation. Additionally, I held ideation sessions with the team to redesign the application based on user feedback and conducted usability tests to validate new designs.
The team
2 Product Managers
2 Front-End Engineers
4 Full-Stack Engineers
The Problem.
MongoDB University had a list of usability and design debt issues that reflected in their Support tickets queue. Users had a hard time finding deadlines, class handouts, and had general navigation issues making it difficult and discouraging to finish their course. Additionally, the application was not responsive, making it hard for users to learn on the go.
The Process.
As part of building the design process, we had different phases to this project.
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Defined the goals and the strategy of the scope of work with stakeholders to determine the definition of success.
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Collected quantitative and qualitative data to understand the main user issues. Conducted usability tests, competitive analysis, and benchmark the metrics.
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Conducted several ideation sessions with stakeholders. Then, brought the design concepts to higher fidelity through wireframes, mockups, and prototyping. Explored various solutions that meet requirements in the Define It stage and address user needs.
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Gathered qualitative feedback from users. Facilitated usability test the solutions with users.
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Worked with engineers and product to scope, build, QA, and launch. 🚀
Define it.
This project was not just an opportunity to redesign the application but also improve the tech stack to streamline development with a design system. Because of that, we had a lot of goals we wanted to achieve, so we broke it down into two types.
Design Goals -
Address the design debt by creating a new UI that is responsive and enables users to more easily complete assignments.
Create consistency across the courseware with a design system.
Project Goals -
Increase course completion and user satisfaction with the app.
Eliminate as many bottlenecks as possible and create a scalable solution.
Understand it.
We wanted to understand the current learning application landscape so we started with a competitive analysis and then conducted several usability studies on the current experience.
Explore it.
After gathering qualitative feedback and quantitative data, we held a series of ideation sessions with the engineers, stakeholders, and subject matter experts to ideate on solutions.
Test it.
I recruited, drafted, and ran the usability tests with the consultation of our single-user researcher. In the tests, I asked users to complete assignments and to playback their comprehension of the UI. After addressing issues that came out of the usability test, I took the user feedback to the team and we worked together to incorporate it into the product.
Build it.
We broke down the designs into reusable components so that engineering could more easily rebuild the UI as a system. And we committed to a design foundation that established utility classes, a 12-col grid, an 8-pixel scale, type, and colors.
What we launched
We launched a new UI for MongoDB University with a scalable design system that will enable any designer and developer to build out new experiences.
And a responsive website so users can learn when they’re commuting or simply learning on the go.
Results
After the launch, we took a look at our support queue. We had a 40% decrease in support tickets and lots of love from our users.
