Pluralsight

Overview

Pluralsight offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website.

This case study is a high fidelity desktop application based on a potential feature that will have the user engaged and have them return to Pluralsight for progressing their education.

This exploration was done of my own accord and at no point was I an employee of Pluralsight.

Role

UX Design Class

Length

2019 Design Sprint - Four Days

Day 1: Mapping and Sketching

I was tasked with the problem of "Why do users not return to Pluralsight" In the first portion of the day we started off with the "How might we " questions that would help us understand the problem. This method would help us understand the situation better and help shape defining the long-term goals.

The second portion of the day consisted of producing solutions. Now that we had a better understanding of the problems from our "How might we ", we started to sketch out possible ideas for our feature. Some features that I came up with were:

  • Certificates upon completion
  • A tracking system to let you know what your progress was during the training course
  • Having a free trial
  • Author reward for uploading articles or training courses
  • Companies that could track employee progress

Day 2: Decide and Story-board

In the morning portion, I had the opportunity to create a wireframe on how we felt the application should look like. After taking a vote of confidence, we decided to add a way that the user could share their personal progress to keep the user engaged.

Some of these features include:

  • Learning streak which would show your learning progress. You could choose either your monthly progress or weekly progress. This feature also had a prompt at the bottom that would describe your IQ level and to keep studying to improve your ranking.
  • Personal progress that would indicate what your current ranking is. It would also show how many points it would be to rank up, the amount of time you have watched instructional videos, completed courses, and badges you have earned through completing courses.
  • Leaderboard that would show your ranking either worldwide or nationally

In the afternoon was the story-board portion of the sprint. I was tasked to design a user test flow for our application. We all voted on the best flow possible that we would end up using for our prototype. After a vote of confidence, we now had a clear direction on where we wanted to go with the application.

Day 3: Prototype

The prototype consisted of pre-made slides that were provided from Pluralsight. This day consisted of putting our heads down and building out the features that we compiled through all of our data research. It was a long day with periodically checking to make sure we were all on track.

Day 4: Test

The testing portion consisted of engaging with users on if they would understand the application and how they would feel wanting to return to further their education through the application.

Throughout the testing, we found that users found it to be intense with the IQ score language. They thought that users may not like the competitive nature of trying to rank up. They did like how you could work at improving what they wanted to and the ability to show off their progress with other users. They saw value in what we were trying to accomplish and thought that it was a good idea.

Overall Conclusion

The design sprint was eye-opening and exhausting. I could see the potential of using this method. It is a good way to push an idea out quickly to shareholders so they have an idea that we were thinking about. Sometimes our ideas work and sometimes they don't.

We also had positive feedback from Pluralsight. These features that we came up with were something that they would potentially use in the future. That made me feel great about all of the work that I have put into this project. I would love to do another design sprint soon.