When I started as the designer at Learningbank in February of 2019 my mission was clear…

Just kidding — I’ve already used that line in a previous case study and as I was beginning this article I found myself revisiting the pages of that chapter:

During the one and a half year I worked as a Designer at Napp I experienced no less than two concept changes for the product, one of which resulted in a full redesign covering the brand, website and online platform as well as the app both for Android and iOS. I considered it to be the biggest, baddest design challenge I’ve ever faced — professionally.

Until now.

Because in February of 2019 I started as Product Designer at Learningbank — a rapidly growing EdTech scaleup with their own Learning Platform.

The new arrivals! 💪From left: Mia, Jonas, Camilla and me–trying to not look awkward (source)

Learningbank is big on on-boarding and being a new employee I was given a three-week schedule with meetings, time with my on-boarding buddy and something else labelled simply “on-boarding task.”

The task was to find low-hanging fruit in design and usability optimisations for the end-user area of the platform where people view and take courses. Then I was to present my results at a meeting with the executive management team including power-woman founder and CEO Stine Schulz. If approved at the meeting it would become a three-week development project right away.

According to the on-boarding schedule I had just seven workdays to do it.

My initial reaction?

Even with a track record of excessive redesign projects it was overwhelming. There would be a crazy amount of money represented in the meeting room for my presentation alone as well as invested in development afterwards. Yikes.

My boss tried to calm the waters and told me they weren’t expecting anything extensive; my initial thoughts about the system and a few ideas in a mockup or two would suffice. While we all agreed a new design direction was needed the “real” redesign project wasn’t planned until later in May. Since I was only just getting acquainted with the system the idea was to start small.

And sure, I could fix a button here and there and make it overall nicer to look at or a bit easier to use. That would probably be the safer bet; presenting something inconsequential so I could leave the meeting room unscathed and hardly noticed — excused by my inexperience in the system and the company.

But I didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t want to do just that.

In fact… I felt a bit frustrated about it.

We could easily spend three weeks on minor design changes which might end up giving end-users some value but honestly, it felt like taking a shot in the dark. I would be letting a golden opportunity fly right past me by staying in the comfort zone while waiting for my trial period to end — when really now was the time to step out of it and take risks.

What we really needed was in fact something extensive and what I needed was to show that it was not only necessary but also entirely possible. In other words; I had to do some research and find the focus for the redesign — fast.

Researching the end-users

Being a new employee I was still unfamiliar with our clients or end-users and platform analytics were limited to some very nerdy system performance data. A survey had recently been sent out to a large client by our student designer but it was still being processed. Due to the tight deadline I decided to make some assumptions based largely on talks with my new colleagues:

Young, Digital, Mobile