WEB PLATFORM DESIGN

Helping students learn about money at Blackbullion

Blackbullion is a platform that helps students find funding and learn about money. Engagement with the learning part of the platform was very low. I led a research project to find out why.

YEAR

2023

MY role

Product designer

Services

UX research
UX/UI design
Workshop facilitation

The challenge

Find out why engagement with the learning platform is so low, in particular why the drop-off rate between sign-in and starting a lesson is so high.

Discovery

I used a range of methods to understand the problem space:

Stakeholder sailboat workshop
Competitor review
Student interviews & usability testing
Financial education attitudes survey
Homepage feedback pop-up

Key findings

I synthesised the research and formed the following key findings:

Platform isn’t compelling enough
Benefits aren’t tangible or immediate
Course titles don’t appeal to students
Homepage content sometimes unsuitable for user
Users can’t find specific courses

Solutions

After presenting the findings to the team, we started by tackling course titles, homepage content, and the user’s struggle to find specific courses. These were fairly quick fixes with an immediate impact.

Course titles
We updated to be more benefit-led and engaging.

Personalised homepage content
We added a few questions to the onboarding flow so we could tailor the homepage content to the user.

Search
We added a search bar to the ‘Explore learning’ section on the homepage and a search option to the library to help users find specific courses.

Results & learnings

Results:

Good feedback on onboarding flow and course titles.
Hoping to see a reduction in drop-off between log-in and starting a lesson.

Learnings:

Be specific with research learnings and recommendations.
In-product surveys can be really insightful. Use them more often!