Project Date: 2008 - 2010

Course Builder

D2L - 2008 - 2010

I designed the Course Builder app, which revolutionized the way instructors and instructional designers created and managed courses. The application featured an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it easy to build and organize lessons, activities, and course structures without requiring technical expertise. By simplifying complex workflows, the tool significantly reduced the time and effort needed for course management. This design not only saved instructors and instructional designers countless hours but also empowered them to focus more on delivering high-quality learning experiences for students.

Discovery

We met with stakeholders and subject matter experts to understand the business goals and pain points for Instructors using the existing systems. I faciliated collaborative sessions with the stakeholders to share research and map the UX outcomes and success metrics for the project. We also implemented Google Analytics into the existing sites to quickly determine drop off points, hot/cold maps, and page views to answer some basic questions and get a baseline.

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Problem Definition

I faciliated collaborative sessions with the stakeholders to share research and map the UX outcomes and success metrics for the project. This is a great way to build a shared understanding of a problem space and the scope for the work being designed.

Design Definition

The outputs of the Design workshops and discovery give us the UX Outcomes and Success metrics we'll be designing for. The next step is to map out the workflows and content to get us something we can measure to evaluate whether we've met our success metrics. We use Design Principles to encapsulate the design rationale that led to the suggested workflows and content.

Prototyping

After mapping out the happy path and we're feeling confident we've got a compelling idea, we switch to prototyping and mocking up functionality to be able to test with representative users. We leverage our out-of-the-box Design System components and just pass in static data to design the workflows and interactions (which we get for free using the design system). We focussed on mobile use cases as a start and then ensured that the tablet and desktop experiences were optimized to bigger screen real estate and a stationary context. We follow a build-measure-learn process by testing early and often with SME's, stakeholders and representative users based on the persona. And at the end of the prototyping phase we've got shell of the front-end code waiting to be wired up by Front-end Developers.

Testing

I use UX Heuristics and Design Principles to evaluate the Design. We do usability testing for both mobile and desktop use cases. We leverage new co-op hires as a fresh set of users to test our apply flows with and determine how effective our solution is. We also test for keyboard and screen reader usability to ensure WCAG 2.1 AA compliance.

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Implementation

After we have tested our prototype thoroughly, we proceed to the implementation phase where we wire up the design and build on top of the target system data and any API's we need to leverage. To do this we leverage our Angular component library and Design system. I act as a key point of contact during this stage to finish the UI Design and answer questions about approach if there are any constaints or scope changes. We also test accessibility and performance metrics with greater scrutinty and examine analytics and qualitative feedback from UAT and ongoing usability testing to constantly improve and iterate on the design.

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Business Outcomes

Increased Engagement

Student participation and activity in the system increased by 42%.

Lower Support costs

Our solution transforms the user experience and visual design resulting in drastic reduction of support calls or technical issues.

Increased Productivity

Our solution reduces the time to complete Benefits enrolment from 30 minutes down to just under 5 minutes and gives the employee peace of mind and some of their time back.

Improved Usability

Qualitatitve testing shows a huge improvement in the employee experience since we create visually compelling experience and streamline the workflows for speed, accuracy and confidence.

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