Impact and numbers

Designing and building a certification platform with worldwide events, trainers, students, and certificates is no simple feat.

We provided insights, ensured clean data, and helped admin teams in two countries juggle huge numbers.

Overview

The tool provides more than CRM for our client – it hosts a community of trainers who interact with their students, organise training events worldwide, and issue, track, and validate attendance certificates.

The admins manage the processes and the entire community: They control licenses and students’ access to courses, and guide trainers who need help organising their training elements. In addition, they help students obtain their certificates and keep everything up to date: certificates, credits, licenses, transactions, brands, courses, and much more. To maintain a comprehensive overview, they need raw data and analytics.

Why the redesign

New functionalities were added over and over again, to the point where a complete redesign had to be considered. We needed to adapt the way the application functions to the complexity it had to be capable of.

The goal

If we were to revamp such a huge platform, we wanted to tick all the boxes rather than simply updating the interface to integrate all the new functionalities: We also aimed to improve the user experience and overall usability as well as achieving consistent branding.

Our process

The Sourcing International digital team approached the project using agile UX methodologies and Kanban flow to manage development activities. An agile team of one product manager, two developers, and one UX/UI designer worked intensively for half a year to meet the ambitious goal.

User experience analysis

The redesign was an opportunity to inspect all functionalities and understand the challenges that end users in various groups were facing.

The strategy called for an audit of the entire platform based on a heuristic evaluation. Next, we entered the qualitative research phase with interviews of our main user groups: admins and trainers. The admins were using the platform on a day-to-day basis, and trainers utilised it frequently as well. The functionality we provided to them needed to match their evolving needs. The result of these interviews was an extensive UX report that formed the basis of our roadmap features.

Task-based approach

The redesign approach is task-based so we can help people accomplish their goals more easily. We extracted the functional needs from the user’s point of view. They are the human and business requirements that our product must meet.

Q2 roadmap

Challenges

One of the challenges was implementing the new design while developing new features that became priorities. An agile process requires staying flexible and building fast. We covered the initial roadmap with a small team and offered assistance for auxiliary features or issues.

We planned, designed, and coded the entire platform ourselves. Precise planning and organisation were the keys to staying on top of our roadmap. We also had to remain flexible and make necessary adaptions to the design. The challenges of a new framework led us to resolve difficulties and implement the best creative design decisions.

The results

The redesign launch was a very exciting moment and the conclusion of 6 intensive months of work: A new user interface, better flow for all user groups, enhanced API integration, and improved system architecture. We created modules and features with localisation in mind while offering support and operations.

Our key results were:

Main achievements

Fully dedicated responsive mode offering a native feel makes for an improved experience and clarity on the go.

Replacing tables with cards provides easy access to information on any device. Improved information organisation and an adaptive layout enhance usability and task speed.

We redesigned the data-heavy insights section for two main user categories.

Top management and super admins One of their needs was to monitor how the platform is doing via a custom analytics and reporting tool. Masters Masters needed their own overview providing only the information they require to avoid cognitive overload.

The team

Product Manager, Alumnus

Communications Specialist, Alumnus

Full-stack Developer

Product Designer

Receiving universally positive feedback was the cherry on top.

“Sourcing International plays a key role regarding our current goal of digitalising the educational activities organised by PhiAcademy on an international level. With the support received throughout the entire product development cycle, we were able to transform a core set of processes within just a few months. PhiAcademy established a certification platform able to handle more than 12,000 graduation certificates per year, aiding over 560 trainers around the globe as well as coordinating our internal teams in two different countries. Soon after deploying a first stable release, we identified further opportunities and ideas together with Sourcing International that were then actively brought to life as additional units in the certification system to achieve a fully-fledged Educational Management module entirely aligned with our organisation’s needs.”