- MY ROLE: Lead Experience Designer
- PROJECT GOAL: To improve the overall engagement, retention, and user experience of Think Academy, IBM’s global internal learning and development platform.
- PROJECT OUTCOME (as of March 2016):
- Visits to the platform increased by 1.5 million in 2015
- Mobile platform downloaded 75K times
- New Think40 pages improved topic completion rate by 37%
What is Think Academy
Think Academy is IBM’s global, internal, learning and development platform. It is the largest corporate MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) in the world. Think Academy contains 23 courses that range from general technology topics to specific IBM products and initiatives.
What was it when I came there?
A beautiful site that IBMers loved. There were just some core usability and retention issues. There was high traffic when promoted internally, but a high bounce rate for many pages. We also had inconsistent and inaccurate reporting.
How have I improved it?
I have focused primarily on three areas:
- increasing overall traffic,
- user retention, and
- improved reporting.
Also introducing features that add value to IBMer’s core experiences.
Redesigned Home page to drive traffic.
Improved viewer retention by introducing new features that add value to IBMer’s core experiences.
A personalized Scorecard that tracks a users progress and gives them recommendations based on their behavior.
Quizzing users on their retention of information from the topics.
I also helped design and launch a new mobile app (Minutes) to help address user feedback around time scarcity.
Next Steps:
Select Feature concepts to be prototyped and tested in a variety of ways with IBMer’s.
A simplified, customized content structure that focuses on surfacing content based on system user data and explicit user input.
Simplified Scorecard experience that helps users focus on metrics that matter to them.
Playlists feature that would allow users to curate and save sets of content that can be shared with other IBMers.
Features continue to be beta tested with IBMer’s and feedback is constantly gathered and integrated into the product roadmap.
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