Coursera is an e-learning platform, with the mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. Bridging the gap between education and employment through elite academic and professional certifications.

While online learning presents unique challenges, student demand for it is rising. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey found that over 50% of students now prefer virtual or hybrid models, as institutions adapt to a tech-centric landscape.

With student’s now expecting more from their online learning experience, meeting those expectations to support their growth can be challenging.

This creates the necessity to explore effective strategies to adequately support student growth.

While accessibility to learning is key to Coursera’s mission, effective learning strategies are essential to truly support student success at scale.

I conducted a competitive analysis, comparing Coursera’s website to three of its’ competitors, SkillShare, Khan Academy, and Udemy, focusing on four main criteria, which were crucial for evaluating the user experience:

Coursera ranked 3ed, based on the criteria, and given their mission to provide universal access to learners, and being a ‘professional bridge’, it makes it that much more important to improve Coursera’s website.

I focused on testing the three core experiences:

Before diving into usability testing, I prepared some questions to establish key learning objectives, to challenge assumptions and surface any issues.

Usability Questions Should Help To:

• Gauge user engagement with the current lecture watching experience

• Identify user pain points with note-taking

• Uncover any confusion during note reviewing

• Identify new pain points

While the core experiences drive user value, they are also designed to deliver on key business goals, such as engagement, adoption and conversion.

I synthesized usability test insights into an empathy map to visualize user behaviors and attitudes, to better understand their core needs and challenges.

Grouping insights chronologically, allowed me to pinpoint the specific stages of the user journey where friction was most intense.

After that, I ranked and prioritized specific issues to focus on, with the high priority issues being making the main video larger and the input field wider.

And medium priority issues being, the auto-transcription saving problem, and the overlap issue between the mini video and input field.

I synthesized empathy and affinity mapping data into an experience map to visualize the emotional highs and lows of the user journey.

To illustrate the value of this redesign, I’ve developed three user stories centered on the core learning journey.

These focus on deepening lecture engagement, streamlining note-taking, and eliminating the friction of tedious reviews to protect student motivation and time.

For brainstorming, I identified specific pain points across lecture watching, note-taking, and reviewing, pairing each with targeted suggestions — highlighting the most promising solutions with red dots.

I plotted the ideas on an impact/effort matrix, prioritizing high-impact, low-effort solutions in the top-right quadrant to optimize resource allocation.

We’ll discuss the refinements based on the top initial concepts and wireframe feedback.

Clear distinction between "notes" and "transcriptions". Merged lecture and note views to eliminate page-switching friction.