To scale the educational startup, I as the lead designer, partnering with other two designers helped steer its pivot from a course provider to a social-learning platform which enables people to learn job-specific skills from community, courses and mentorship.
- Product vision & strategy
- Research, prototyping, UI design
- Information Architecture
- Mentoring junior designers
- Design system
- Design QA
- Design from 0 to 1
Liba's mission is to empower young people to unlock their career potential by learning directly from experienced industry professionals. I joined Liba when it was initially a course provider, with an informative website showcasing the courses co-created by Liba and industry experts. However, we soon have seen that social learning can take many different forms, and decided to build a platform that enables people to get career support through cohort-based courses, 1:1 mentorship, and industry-specific community communication.
After launching the new platform, we discovered that mentorship is the most flexible and effective way for people to learn from experienced professionals. Therefore, we pivoted our focus and optimized the platform specifically for mentorship scenarios.
In the last two years Liba has helped 500+ people get offers from top companies and Universities by connecting them with industry professionals via real-time online courses. The progress proved that directly learning job-specific skills from experienced folks could really accelerated people's professional development. At that time, Liba only had an informational website (libaedu.com) to display the courses co-created by mentors and Liba. Both the business objectives and emerging user needs identified from daily interaction with mentors and students showed that it's time to take the next step and scale the startup.
Social learning can take more forms
The visitors of our website are all in a stage of pursuing a career or a degree, but it turned out not everyone would take a course to achieve their goals. Some people have a very specific career problem they want to consult about, and some people are very active discussing and sharing ideas in the WeChat group we built for each specific industry. That suggested social learning is effective and it can take more forms, not just through cohort-based courses. Enabling more forms of social learning becomes the first goal of the next version of the product.
Onboarding mentors was a manual process
Another opportunity we have seen is that it takes lots of efforts to onboard a mentor and create a course. Back-and-forth communication between mentors and our Liba's operation team is low-efficient and cumbersome. The second goal is to help mentors to create those learning entities effortlessly and efficiently.
Our expectation for the first launch of the platform is just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. How do we move from the vision to what exactly the product should include? I outlined the key tasks that we expect users to be able to complete on the platform and specific steps that users will go through underneath each task. We use this to plot the big picture of the product, and refine it after each product discussion.
After capturing the key use cases using user story map, the next step is to define how things fit together on the product. As we aim to integrate all these utility into one product and this product will be new to users, homepage would serve as the introductory page for new visitors, which summarizes all the things they can do, with entrances to the dedicated pages of each section. After log-in, there was no more homepage, top navigation is enough for users to access to different sections.
After capturing the key use cases using user story map, the next step is to define how things fit together on the product. As we aim to integrate all these utility into one product and this product will be new to users, homepage would serve as the introductory page for new visitors, which summarizes all the things they can do, with entrances to the dedicated pages of each section. After log-in, there was no more homepage, top navigation is enough for users to access to different sections.
Groups are aimed to help connect people in the same industry and allow them to share ideas. Communication and information exchange can happen in both post-and-reply forums and group chatrooms. So which form should we take? The main use case here is for people to ask questions and discuss topics with others in the same background. As a new platform, our expectation for the size of each group is less than 500. So for such a relatively small community, there is a stronger sense of fun and support you get on group chats when there’s a lag between posting something and getting a reply on forums.
However, information spreading is unorganized and real-time on group chats, which will be a loss to community members because it will be easy for them to miss important content. So for each group, we had a resource page for our operation team and mentors to share articles and videos that are related and useful to members.
.gif)
Besides increasing the capabilities of the business, another main goal in scale-up is to automate time-consuming processes. Onboarding a mentor used to take lots of time, from introducing what we are doing, asking the mentor to provide personal profile, evaluate the eligibility of the mentor, guiding the mentor to create a course. It usually takes more than 4 hours back-and forth communication between Liba and a mentor before a mentor officially join us, and an addition of 5 hours before a course is created. This numbers don't include the individual work time. What I did was to surface all the communicative content in somewhere on the platform so people who have an interest to be a mentor and get to know us in one minute. The second thing was to make the process of applying to be a mentor and creating a course self-service.
.gif)
Apply to a mentor
.gif)
Create a 1:1 session
Over time, we have come to realize the immense potential of mentorship, and it is something that we must prioritize more. We have observed that many structured courses ended up with more organic and flexible communication between mentors and mentees. However, the platform structure at that time could not support this vision adequately as it gave equal importance to all its pillars, making it difficult for users to perceive the value of mentorship when they come. Even for those users who were already interested in mentorship, finding the right mentor required extra effort. Therefore, the redesign objective was to streamline users' path to mentorship by providing clear and critical information at all levels — from the homepage to the CTA on the mentor detail page.
The previous homepage provided a general overview of the platform's features, with mentorship being just one of them. User feedback revealed that visitors were not fully aware of how mentorship works. Thus, to align with the business strategy of Liba pivoting to a mentorship platform, the homepage serving as the entry point of our site was optimized to help users build a mental model that Liba is the place to find a mentor to help advance their career.
I changed the image, text, and CTAs on the hero header to communicate this core value at the very first sight. I removed any content that was not relevant to mentorship from the homepage, then reorganized the remaining content based on relevancy to mentors and mentorship.
I moved "Find a Mentor" tab to the leftmost, the most prominent spot on the top navigation bar as users scan from left to right. I also used a drop-down menu technique in both the mentor and course sections, allowing users to preview which industries the mentors are from or courses are aimed at, so they can directly navigate to the specific part they are interested in.
To help users find the right mentor more quickly and easily, I made several improvements on our mentor list page. Firstly, I added more advanced filters to allow users to narrow down their search based on specific criteria, such as skills, area of mentorship. Additionally, I enhanced the mentor preview cards by including more detailed information about each mentor, such as badges earned, an introduction, skills, rating, and fees. This information is critical for users to make an informed decision about which mentor to choose, without having to click through to the complete profile.
The basic mentor profile that previously appeared in the top-left corner of the page was upgraded to a more detailed version on the main section. Below the profile are the mentor's courses, created content, and reviews from mentees.
To give mentorship more emphasis, I created a dedicated call-to-action area to encourage users to apply. This shift in design makes the primary objective of the page to help users decide whether to apply for mentorship, while the previous design treated mentorship sessions, courses, and mentor-created content equally, which did not effectively prompt users to take any specific action.
Having seen varying levels of support requested by mentees, we decided to enable two forms of mentorship: monthly mentorship and one-off sessions. In the CTA section, I intentionally made the CTA for monthly mentorship more prominent to nudge users towards choosing the monthly, while still giving them the choice to opt for the one-off option.
I applied progressive disclosure to break down the decision into two steps, deferring the secondary information and actions until after users had selected their primary option, to lower the chances that users will feel overwhelmed by the amount of information to consume. If users choose monthly mentorship, the secondary action for them is to decide between applying for one month or one quarter, which comes with 10% discount. For those who opt for one-off sessions, the next step for them is to select the topic for that session.
