Pluralsight - Internal Production Tool
🗓 May 2019 - January 2020
👥 Internal-facing
🖥 Desktop
🎨 Me (UX Designer/Research), Dev Team (4)
🔧 Built and live
😑 Problem: The production for Pluralsight’s articles is too manual and too slow.
😇 Outcome: Production increase from 10 to 16.15 articles/week over a six month period. 📈 The goal was 15 articles/week.
Pluralsight helps organizations build tech skills at scale
Context
Pluralsight is a technology education platform. Pluralsight has built a successful video content library with the world's top experts, nevertheless, many technologists also love to read, and in 2018, Pluralsight released its first text-based articles, called “Guides”.
When I joined the team in 2019, I designed a tool where technology experts can draft, review, and publish their knowledge through articles. Experts can also communicate and collaborate with an in-house editor within the tool.
Image: High fidelity mock-up of internal production tool
My role
As the design and research lead on a team, these were the main phases of the project and my responsibilities in them:
User research:
Planned, conducted, and synthesized six remote interviews
Presented the findings to my team and stakeholders and offered strategic recommendations
Workshop facilitation:
Facilitated a Product Strategy Workshop to determine what user problem the production tool would solve and ideate a variety of potential solutions
UX/UI design & testing:
Created a high-fidelity prototype to demonstrate the solution
Conducted validation testing with potential users
Research and strategy
What we explored
I spent two weeks conducting and synthesizing exploratory research with our target user group of technology experts through remote user interviews.
What we learned
We discovered that the biggest problem our users (technology experts) face is efficiency. The majority of the experts are creating this content on top of their full-time jobs. Though there are extrinsic motivators (e.g. money and personal brand), many of these content creators share their knowledge because they want to help others and/or they love teaching. So, being able to share their knowledge with the world as efficiently as possible is extremely important.
Designs & Testing
Process
With our problem statement, guiding principles, and papers full of sketched ideas from the team, I got to work, ideating some more, flushing out the pieces that made sense, and figuring out how it would all fit together.
After several iterations and customer preference testing, I landed on designs that I was 80% confident in. Why 80%? Because I felt pretty confident in the solution, but didn’t wait for the perfect conditions to provide value to customers.
What used to be a lot of emails back and forth between experts and editors, now can be done in a single tool. Experts can immediately begin drafting their content in the tool’s plain text editor with Markdown.
Image: An article in a draft state after it has had a review from the editor
Reflection
If wouldn’t have spoke with the users, I would have gone off and created a Medium-like experience. For some users, this might have been great. But not for the majority of our technology experts.
Our initial goal was to produce 15 articles/week. As of July 2020, our production has increase from 10 to 16.15 articles/week over a six month period. In October 2020, we hit a historic weekly record of 31 articles in one week!
Additionally, I had never designed an experience where I had to account for two user flows in the same product. This was a challenge, and I spent lots time on a whiteboard and in flow charts before ever touching Figma.
Lastly, I loved co-creating this experience with my team. I am a better designer and a better human because of my teammates.