On my first day at Skillsoft, my manager asked me to put together a critique of our app as someone with fresh eyes. I noticed immediately that while our home screen exposed an immense amount of information and choices, there wasn’t a clear path for learners to embark upon. And even for learners who knew what they wanted, the existing playlist feature was rudimentary, making it hard to organize your own learning.
Nine months later, I got a chance to fix this by enhancing the feature.
In 2020, Skillsoft’s playlist feature was rudimentary. Users could add learning content to a single playlist screen, launch it from there, and delete it.
Our old playlist feature was so underutilized that historical data weren’t useful for steering the course of enhancements. Instead, we focused on competitive research. Playlists are mostly a solved problem, with ubiquitous apps like Spotify and Youtube providing many excellent patterns for designers to study.
We backed up this study of best in world solutions with our customers’ feedback from interviews and forums.
From customer asks and best practices, we delineated the feature set our user audience needed. Through conversations with the developers, the product manager and I defined a feasible approach for enabling multiple playlists, reordering of items in lists, sharing, and easier creation of lists while browsing.
This was a bit much for our MVP, though. We were able to identify a few minor features as nice-to-haves and cut them — for example, in the MVP, we didn’t indicate whether a given playlist item had been started or already completed. But not including playlist sharing in the initial release was what really made our MVP fit into the time we had available.
While a playlist itself isn’t terribly complicated, adding the feature to an existing app mustn’t burden the existing UX with something that feels like a bolt-on.
To that end, my first stop as a designer wasn’t the playlist itself, but our app’s home page and other elements of the browse experience. Every piece of content in Skillsoft is represented in the browse interface by cards, and each card had an existing 3-dot for opening an action menu already.
Sizing and aligning the menus correctly required several conversations with the devs, partly because the app is fully internationalized. Not every language has an expression as short as, “Playlist Add/Remove.”
Not every project needs rigorous user testing. In the case of playlists, best practices and talking to our customers provided a firm footing.
Although it’s not my favorite format as a UXer, my product manager got our prototype in front of a large customer focus group. We learned a lot about the relative importance of features we were considering for the MVP to our current customers. The product managers at Skillsoft were very skilled at getting high quality feedback from this group, and it changed my mind a bit about the usefulness of focus groups.
Having a fully functional prototype to show our developers was also very useful on this project. Not every project needs a functional prototype shown to development, but in this case, with a lot of action menus triggering modals and screen loads, it really helped them.
Getting the feature to where it is now took several release cycles. The MVP was the largest and included most of the final functionality. In the second release, we added a sharing feature so that learners can socialize their lists.
In coming releases, we’ll add many of the nice-to-haves that we needed to omit from the MVP. Nor am I done tinkering. I’m trying to sell my product manager on automatically creating a playlist of any content that the user Likes while browsing, as the platform now lacks a way to do this.
The results have been more than satisfying, even with some enhancements still to come. Our Pendo data clocks a roughly 60% increase in usage of the playlists feature since the MVP release.