Unity Learn 2.0

Unity was seeking to increase user adoption of their website. To do this end, they needed to address the following issues:

1. New-comers did not know where to start and the amount of topics and learning material was overwhelming.
2. Experienced learners struggled to learn how to navigate the platform and how to locate learning materials for their specific goals.

Unity also wanted to improve their content creators’ experience:

1. Unity employees experienced a lot of frustration and were slowed down by their CMS which was outdated and not geared towards users that created content on a daily basis.
2. The complexity of the CMS also kept away content creators from outside of Unity, which opted for more user-friendly options.

Scoping the project

Utilizing Unity's personas, we created a Customer Journey Map that became the base to start a User Story Map session with Unity’s team. Throughout this session we defined goals, expectations and key features for a minimum viable product.

Ideation sessions and layout definition

Through ideation sessions with the entire team and whiteboarding sessions with the UI Designer, we established components, hierarchy and the layout for the most important pages.

Testing

The client wanted their team to conduct the usability tests at Unity’s offices, so I prepared the scripts and instructions on how to set the testing environment, how to introduce the participants to the test, and how to interact with them. On top of testing common attributes, such as ease of navigation, we tested for wording and structure,content discoverability andprogression tracking.

Defined the project scope, minimum viable product and the roadmap for future development. As external consultants, we were hired to kick-off and setup the project in a way that, eventually, Unity could take full control of the platform development.

Launched Learn 2.0, a platform where users could easily explore, locate the right content for their goals and experienced level and track their progress. We validated this through continuous remote testing and a final in-person session with Unity users of different experience levels.

Revamped Learn’s CMS to enable creators to create tutorials, projects and tracks. Feedback from content creators was overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to their openness, we were able to consult them throughout the entire development cycle.

The tutorial page was one of the most important sections of the website as this was the primary destination for users. Tutorials could consist of text, videos, images, code snippets or a mix of these. Furthermore, they included downloadable content and essential metadata (e.g. duration, difficulty, etc).

I worked with our UI designer to create a layout that first highlighted informational data so users quickly knew if they had found the right tutorial (topic-wise). To display the content we constrained the tutorials’ layout to a single column to ensure visual consistency across tutorials from different creators.

We focused on ease of navigation and giving users visibility of their progress. Weadded a sticky menu with the tutorial’soutline which allowed users to know where they wereand to move between sections. Finally, if the tutorial is part of a learning track, the top barshows users their progress in that track and lets them navigate between tutorials.

Frequent Changes in Project Leadership

As Unity's project management evolved, shifts in the project’s oversight became frequent. New leaders often questioned prior agreements, leading to project standstills. To mitigate this, the project manager and I worked together on documenting design discussions and agreements and, when necessary, get written approval from the client. Being able to point back to these records, helped the client to realize that all decisions we made, had been previously discussed with their team. This reduced pushback and, in time, increased the clients trust on us.

My team and I successfully kick-started the Learn project and delivered the MVP version of both platforms: the CMS and the e-learning website. We also did this in a way that Unity could take ownership of the product once it was launched.  

While this project had a lot of design challenges, the main challenge was dealing with constant changes generated by the rotating leadership of the project. However, our design artifacts and methods, such as workshops and user story maps, as well as constant communication, helped increase clients’ trust, reduce uncertainty and, overall, improve collaboration between parties.