Nitrolearning
Course Authoring Software
Summary:
Creating e-learning courses can be super overwhelming, especially for people who don't have a lot of digital knowledge. That's why Nitrolearning, an e-learning course creator company, made the Courze&Cloud a course authoring software to make the process easy and accessible for everyone.
MY ROLE:
Product designer
THINGS I CREATED:
Competitor analysis
User interviews
Usability testing
User flows
Product design
Creating concepts
TOOLS I USED:
Figma
How did the project start?
As Nitrolearning is an e-learning course creator company, the Course Authoring Software project started as an in-house application to help create e-learning courses for our learning instructors. And as it's worked quite well for them, we thought it's worth improving for others too.
Our goal:
If somebody can write a digital document, they can use our course editor, too.
Our ideal customer:
Companies where learning and development are essential.
Main competitors:
Easygenerator
Articulate
Stakeholders and teams:
At the project's early stage, I worked in parallel in more teams.
UX team
Cross-funkcional agile team
product owner and CEO
learning instructors
Teams I've been involved in
I was responsible for the daily UX process in my cross-functional agile team.
I was working with our learning instructors to work out the methodology to help our customers create good courses.
I have worked closely with our product owner and the company CEO on product strategies.
Besides that, we had a UX team; we had a UX team with a weekly meeting to consult about our projects and share our new knowledge.
Main challenges:
Defining two experiences in one screen: a simple flow for the average users, but a full-blown editing experience for experts.
WYSIWYG: seeing and modifying the final course appearance in the editor.
Creating visual flexibility to follow any company brand.
Supporting different course formats, like storytelling, e-book, and video.
Structure of the application:
Admin for the user rights management and maintaining the courses
Editor for creating courses and exams
Course view for students
Information Architecture of the editor:
Real time editor
We approached it with a multi-layer structure: the top layer is the real-time editor where you can build a course from scratch without any experience in the e-learning field.
Detailed editor
The second layer is a detailed editor, for which you need a more mature teaching experience. This is the place where you can fine-tune the widgets, set up web accessibility, exam details etc.
Global setting
The bottom layer consists of global settings where you can define styles and themes, or set up the methodology supporting features for the entire curriculum.
Responsibilities:
I had been working as a UX designer. So my primary responsibilities were:
Doing UX research.
Creating UX / UI design for E-learning course editor web application.
Keeping the complex Information Architecture up to date.
Supporting and communicating with the developers in a cross-functional team.
Working in an agile environment.
How did we do UX research?
When we declared our hypotheses, we started our research with competitor analysis. For this, we used software reviews and selection platforms. We found two main competitors Articulate Rise 360 and Easygenerator, so we concentrated on them.
We used three research methods.
User interview
First, we tried the applications and made a heuristic evaluation. There are some general principles for interaction design, and we use this for analysing them.
After that, we made Usability Testing sessions, which means our participants had to follow a scenario and think aloud. In this way we could see the main advantages and disadvantages compared to our application.
And finally, we could interview users who used our competitors' products (like Articulate Rise) and our applications.
We used this process in the early stage of our product.
But of course, UX research is an ongoing process, so we have continuously monitored our competitors and interviewed our customers.
What were our insights?
The Hungarian market is in an early stage regarding regarding learning and development. To be successful, we should educate and support our customers.
To enable the adoption of our system, we had to allow customers with functioning e-learning portals to import their already existing material.
Our software usage learning curve is relatively short and faster than our competitor's applications.
Where are we now?
In general, I'm proud that our e-learning authoring tool has been helping to create better E-learning courses for people who are less tech-savvy.
Some Hungarian enterprise businesses are using our product already, and we already have the first foreign customer as well, but we would like to find more clients in the international market. This would be a great success for our small team.
For further marketing activities on an international market we would need funding, therefore the founders are actively pitching our solution to find investors.