Coursera was founded with one simple mission: To provide life-transforming learning experiences to learners all around the world.
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Today, they are a global platform for online learning and career development, offering anyone, anywhere, access to online courses and degrees from leading universities and companies.

A survey from Chronicle, highlights students' preferences for remote learning options, during the Covid-era, as institutions moved towards online learning.

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

This situation highlights the necessity to explore effective strategies to adequately support student growth, in this evolving landscape.

With Coursera’s strong mission to make learning more accessible on a global scale, it is equally important to consider how effectively students are learning on the platform.

I conducted a competitive analysis to compare Coursera with three of its’ competitors, and focused on four main criteria, which were crucial for evaluating the user experience:

I identified some interesting opportunities for design, as well as some trends, in the spider chart below:

I decided to focus on testing the 3 key problem assumptions, centered around the three main experiences:

To connect our business goals to Coursera's mission of providing life-transforming learning experiences globally, the primary goals I focused on were engagement, adoption, and conversion, which are vital for tracking our success.

Before usability testing, my research goal was to focus on establishing key learning objectives.

This preparation ensures that our questions effectively challenge our assumptions about potential issues.

Usability Questions should help to:

• Gauge user engagement with the current lecture watching experience

• Identify user pain points, needs, and goals related to note-taking

• Uncover any confusion during the note reviewing process

• Identify new pain points

I organized insights from usability testing by plotting them into an empathy map.

This method provides a visual representation of user attitudes and behaviors, giving us a clearer picture of the end-user.

By capturing what users say, do, think, and feel, we deepen our understanding of their needs and challenges.

Here, similar insights were grouped together and ordered chronologically. This approach helps visualize user pain points more effectively.

By plotting these insights into key stages, we gain clarity on user needs.

I then outlined the specific issues with assigned priorities, to help focus our efforts effectively.

‍High Priority (Major usability problems that need immediate attention):
• The most critical needs identified include a larger video screen and a wider input field.
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Medium Priority (Important but non-urgent issues):
• The auto transcription saving problem, the overlap between the video and input field, as well as the need for a clearer distinction between "notes" and "transcriptions" were all noted as medium priority issues.

Insights gained from affinity and empathy mapping play a key role in developing the experience map.

This mapping process allows us to identify user sentiments and highlight significant challenges throughout the user journey, from lecture watching to note reviewing.

To communicate how this redesign would provide value to the user, I've come up with three key user stories.

User stories also serve as a quick reference for teams during development, helping them to grasp user needs and goals.

My brainstorming process focused on identifying specific issues in the three key areas of concern: lecture watching, note taking, and note reviewing.


For each issue, I also came up with suggestions, focusing on the most promising ideas (indicated with red dots), to make the platform more conducive to learning.

I then organized the ideas into an impact/effort matrix, prioritizing the ideas in the top right quadrant, with the highest potential impact and relatively low effort.

This is a useful tool for decision-making and resource allocation.

I sketched out some initial wireframes, adding stars to the most promising ideas.

We'll take a closer look at the details, as we go over the low fidelity wireframes next.

Clear distinction between "notes" and "transcriptions," which helps reduce the time needed for review, and lowers cognitive load.