The goal at Blackboard is to provide learners and educators with features that help them save time and effort to focus on their core activity: education.

To improve the experience of creating and managing Learning Modules, I started with research on the latest educational trends. I did a competitive analysis, conducted a heuristic evaluation of our current feature, and interviewed educators to understand how and when they use “modules” in their course lifespan.

I used Journey Maps and Empathy maps to document the findings, which helped me discover what enhancements made sense in our current feature and identified other opportunities to put the feature in the path of a competitive advantage over our competition.

We improved the workflow that:

- Required a creation path unique to this type of content and forced the user to go back and forth across the interface.

- Presented a discoverability problem from having a property included under a setting that users are familiar with but not in the context of the Learning Modules.

- Blocked user actions if they didn’t follow a specific path to include content in their modules.

The new solution:

-   Aligns better with other content creation workflows

-   Presents the user all the settings in a logical and visible way

-    Gives the user flexibility to choose their way to include content in their modules.

In addition, the research provided us with improvements on where to place the module’s description and engage with users; we were also able to come to a compromise as what the appropriate number of characters and formatting controls we could provide for the tool.

Unfortunately, the project’s scope didn’t allow further development to potentialize the feature, and they currently sit as part of the backlog. Still, with minor adjustments, we were able to improve the experience and usage of the tool.