HBS Online
Overview
Harvard Business School (HBS) Online is an online learning platform designed to offer cohort-based, asynchronous learning experiences from HBS Professors to a global audience.
It has been around since about 2010, and in 2023 we undertook a total redesign of the platform, focusing on making the platform modern, responsive, and WCAG accessible.
With a phased and collaborative approach, we redesigned a total of 2 dozen individual features, enhancing each while maintaining and celebrating the core of what makes HBS Online unique - its active, case-based, and social learning model.
My contribution
Lead Designer User Researcher
The team
2 x UX Designers 6 x Developers 2 x Project Managers
Year
2024
Process
Understanding the vision
Going into this project, it was important that we understand our guiding principles for the redesign. There were hundreds of points in the process where we referred to these principles to help inform our design decisions.
We wanted our platform to become three things:
- Modern and scalable
- Mobile responsive
- WCAG accessible
These three core principles guided our research, design, and implementation of the final result.
Research
Research was conducted with a variety of stakeholders. The following are just some of the research tasks conducted by our team to inform this project:
- Surveys with internal stakeholder groups from across the organization (content, marketing, support, program administrators, faculty)
- Persona creation to qualify different types of users and validate our design ideas against them
- Interviews and focus groups with past users
- Asynchronous user testing with prospective users in our target demographic
- Design thinking workshops with a small team of stakeholders to ideate solutions
- Design feedback sessions with key stakeholders
Each session, survey, and interview informed a piece of the final version of the design. This often included pivots from the original design idea.
For example: in one iteration, we had planned to include a complex form-based "social" tool alongside content. This feature aligned extremely well with faculty goals, but we needed to ask users. In an interview, one user told us:
I see what you're going for, but realistically I would never go out of my way to use this - it's way too complicated.
This single piece of feedback (given that it was later echoed by several other users) highlighted the need to emphasize simplicity in our next-to-course experience. This greatly changed the course of the design, ultimately improving it and increasing usage post-release.
This is just one example of the direct impact that user input had on the iterative design process.
Another example of user research
Below are slides from the results deck - just one example of a research project done with past users. This test was designed to help determine the initial direction for our dashboard landing page.
Iterative design
This project took dozens (and dozens!) of design iterations from start to finish. Some feedback loops were short, some longer.
We used a collaborative, open-ended approach while always keeping our eyes on the deadline.
Learnings & Next Steps
The new dashboard was released in January 2024. Since then, we have seen improvements in participant satisfaction scores, improved support ticket rates, and an overall reduction in negative feedback related to the platform itself when a sentiment analysis was run on open-ended survey questions.
The learnings from this large-scale undertaking were plentiful. Some personal skills gained throughout this process include:
- Design system creation, utilization
- Component-based development
- Close, agile collaboration with developers
- Stakeholder communication best practices
- Project management and organization
Setting ourselves up for future success
Our work on this platform sets HBS Online up for whatever the future holds. Because we focused on creating a platform that was built with a scalable Javascript framework, the development work we did to create the new version will be a critical foundation for continuing to iterate on the platform design and bring it into the future.