Lesson templates UX Flow
Lyearn | September 2021
Lyearn used to be a Learning Management System (LMS) software for giant corporates. Our primary users were team leads in charge of training employees. Their first job on the platform was to create content for the team in the form of courses and assessments.
One of the primary tools on the platform was the Course Builder. This, simply put, is an authoring tool to create and publish online courses from scratch.
The course builder worked on a block system just like Notion
The Problem
We realized that the course builder had a certain learning curve. Even after the authors got more familiar with its working, the individual lessons coming out of weren’t so great.
Some of them had misused blocks and felt out of place.
Some of them could use different blocks to better manage the information.
We had to help the authors on calls to structure and design their courses before they published them.
With a handful of users authoring courses, it was easy for us to closely work with them to create beautiful courses. However, as we scale, we needed a reliable solution that would help authors to design better courses on their own.
Project Goal
You might remember having played with LEGO or Mechanix, which came along with some instruction manual. The manual not only had ideas on what could be built by using all the pieces but also steps on how to do it yourself.
Now, we couldn’t exactly make an instruction manual on writing, but the idea of having something pre-built for them to look at was interesting.
Perhaps the best way to tell authors what they are capable of creating would be to show them some inspiration. That’s exactly what we wanted to achieve with our lesson templates.
There were 2 main things to be figured out, before getting to the flow:
What type of template lessons would be needed (example: introduction for the course, tutorials etc.)?
How do we decide what content to choose for the templates?
Research discoveries
I got a chance to get on research calls and dig up on this idea. Here are a couple of keynotes from the research:
1. Not exactly “authors”
Collaborating with them on calls reminded us of the fact that even though we referred to these users as authors (for a lack of a better term) they weren’t exactly professional writers. They were marketing professionals, artists, sales reps who had knowledge of their craft but not all of them had experience in writing. They just had content that could be taught.
Creating academy content wasn’t their primary job either, and so they spent the minimal attention to build courses. This meant we had to reinforce the usage of different blocks in some way.
2. Interviewing the right users
An interesting insight was not all the calls cleared our doubts, in fact, some of the authors felt just as vague as we did at describing what their lessons should look like.
The need for templates varied with how frequently an academy wrote content. For instance, an academy had just made a few courses on the platform, but that was what they were going to have for a while.
In contrast, there was a SaaS firm that frequently made new courses and other learning content as they had to keep employee training updated with every new release of their products.
Lesson templates would serve different purpose for new and existing users.
3. A makeshift solution for templates
Another great insight was the fact that one firm built dummy courses in the draft that served as templates for the courses to be published. This meant the existence of a scenario where the author knew how to structure lessons and what template could be useful for his academy.
Choosing the few initial templates
I also studied existing courses on the platform to find emerging patterns both inside the academy, and also compare them amongst other academies to find the first few possible lesson templates. This included not just the outline of the course but also figuring out what blocks are being used inside each lesson.
Comparing curriculums internally and also across academies to look for some common templates
Template library
We built the first few iterations around mainstream content such as book summaries. This was a good starting point for now because we didn’t have enough time and effort to put into research and figure out what kind of content would suit the most in our templates.
The first few iterations included basic blocks and advanced blocks such as interactive cards
Although, we were still a bit skeptical about this idea, as randomly selected mainstream topics as the content was still vague in terms of likeability and ensuring good block usage, so it didn’t look quite right as a long-term solution.
We needed more data on what blocks to use precisely and what content is more understandable.
To attempt this, we simply came up with an idea that could help us solve the “content” problem by analyzing the scenarios we had.
By introducing a flow to create your own template, we are dividing the library into custom and generalized sections. This flow would ideally solve the scenario that the SaaS firm originally had (specific templates for their own use cases) and also provide us with data to improve our existing templates for the same.
For example, “introduction Lesson” used repeatedly from various courses across academies would combine to make a one-size-fits-all “introduction lesson” template.
The interface
I began with making a rough flow and figuring out the entry points for accessing and using the template library.
Rough flow for lesson templates
Flow: Using a template
Flow: Saving a template
Leveraging templates: more iterations
As we were closing in on the first version of templates, around the same time, we were also ideating on help docs. For the sake of iteration, we came up with the idea of making lesson templates on how to use the course builder.
This seemed like an idea worth a shot because, it would realistically just show how to use different kind of blocks to our authors
Closing note
This was the happiest flow for the first version of the lesson templates. What started as preset formatting (blocks), evolved into preset lessons and as we move down the ladder of complexity could eventually lead to presets at the course level.
When you hear the word “Templates”, the idea seems pretty self-explanatory. Perhaps we all remember using good ol’ Powerpoint with those fancy slide options to make our 5th-grade presentations. Even so, there was a lot to understand and empathize about behind such a simple idea.
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