Revel product strategy
Background
I became responsible for the entire Revel portfolio in February 2020. Prior to that, I managed a team that focused on the student experience and managed the mobile experience. My first task in my new role was to assess where we were at and help define the roadmap and a process to support it.
My role
Design strategy and process, workshop facilitation, research synthesis, design vision and concepts.
Revel Assignment Manager circa early 2020
Problems to be solved
Revel’s inception came from qualitative educators who were leaving Pearson’s other offerings due to complexity. The promise of Revel was that it would be a simpler, easier setup. However, When Revel was first released, its focus still leaned towards the power user. As the Product Lead and I saw it, this lead to some consequences in the market:
only 50% of Revel educators created assignments. The other 50% used it as a digital textbook only. This created a chain of consequences such as:
Over 1,300 support calls from students who couldn’t enroll because the educator did not set up the product. This issue cost $153,000 in support volume.
An increased negative perception of Revel by students as being “a very expensive textbook” resulting in a net negative NPS score.
450 support calls coded as “No clear steps on how to use Revel” 450 isn’t a lot, however the fact that “No clear steps deserves its own code is astonishing.
Revel adoption is led by sales, not direct interaction with the Pearson website. Prior to 2018, we had a dedicated sales force for Revel, which has since been reduced and generalized across all of our products and texts. The impact is what once was a white gloved onboarding is now up to the educator to discover.
The Revel Instructor, circa early 2020
Interviews
In 2018, our former research team conducted interviews with 28 educators on assignment creation and management. The team and I revisited this data to search for key insights. Here’s what we found:
Key Insights
While educators want the experience to be easy and efficient (they don’t want to spend hours on these assignments), they also want to retain a sense of control. While we have indeed offered them that control, it has been too much. We need to maintain illusory control while hiding the complexities.
Courseware is the nadir of their routine. We have a customer who is starting off negative, without the white glove experience they are use to, we need to consider clear controlled steps through the process
If they do it right, they will only set up a course once and then use the saved copies henceforth (at least until a major content update).
Revisiting personas
Customer journey mapping
After revising the personas, I gathered partners across the organization (from customer support sales, development to VPs of product), for a comprehensive customer journey mapping exercise.
We spent two days mapping the educator and learner. Due to the pandemic, it was pretty difficult to keep everyone engaged at first, until I learned to break it up into two hour chunks with ample breaks.
We collected perspectives across the organization, which included a fair share of information bias and personalizing. During synthesis, I fact checked the findings through data via Google Analytics and Tableau and support call logs, additional interviews with customer support and our faculty advisors and verbatims from monthly NPS reports.
The gathered data informed the sentiment graph.
Below is an excerpt of the finished journey map. It is hard to do it it justice in this portfolio, so I’ve linked the full maps in case you are interested.
Educator Journey Map
Learner Journey Map
Remote “Whiteboard”
Excerpt of the educator journey map
Hypotheses
By simplifying our assignment creation process and creating a more direct funnel to guide our educators through the process from adoption to creation, we will encourage good assignment practices within Revel, increase our assignment creation percentage and give the learner a higher sense of value.
Desired Outcomes:
An increase of assignment creation by 10-25%
A decrease of negative sentiments regarding value in NPS reports
Building a process
In kicking off this work, I worked with my Product lead in establishing a Sprint 0, which in most cases started with a design sprint. By opening the design process to be inclusive across disciplines, we established a design culture that helped the team align on concepts, use cases and approach.
MVP
In Fall 2020, we released our MVP of our simplified Revel. The UX team worked to design an approach that would minimize the amount of time an Instructor would spend creating their curriculum. This release coincided with a release of our new platform.
Revel Simplified Assignment Creation v1
Revel Dashboard
Outcomes
Results were mixed; while the user experience was considered an improvement and while overall assignment creation increased by 2% (short of what we were looking for), API and platform hiccups, combined with a new experience to learn led to some unintended issues.
We also only solved one of the problems. Educator onboarding relies on several steps: Creating a Course, Creating Assignments and inviting students. Our current structure (shown below) is disparate and requires the user to discover their next step. This results in a higher than desired drop off rate.
Even with improvements to assignment creation, the journey requires far too much discovery
Prepping phase 2
Which brings us to the change in strategy. In order the increase awareness of the service that Revel provides, and hopefully increase adoptions, We are currently building wizard to step the educator through the onboarding process before choosing to use Revel in the classroom. We are working across teams to create multiple entry points, from sales, to response emails to an entry on Pearson.com
Desired outcomes:
An increase of adoptions, particularly from self service.
A decrease in support call volume - I would be happy if we lost the 400+ calls regarding “I don’t know how to use Revel”
A decrease in drop off rate -or- Evidence of return sessions from unique user ids from adoption to completion.
Challenges
There isn’t one team responsible for the end to end Revel experience. By expand out towards Pearson.com, we inherit several dependencies and teams who have built this parts of the journey in the past. Our goal is to bring those teams in to build an adoption flow that can connect anywhere
Wizard workflow
Addendum: Visual design exploration
Branding at Pearson has always been elusive. As a textbook company, its standards have been print focused, while creating some extremely limiting constraints on how styles could be used digitally. With new leadership, the Portfolio teams have been encouraged to experiment with our visual design to transition our products into something more consumer facing and delightful.
With this encouragement and thinking through the issues our users have with confusion and value. I established three words to influence how we use design moving forward: Clarity Focus and Depth
Clarity: Our educators and learners need to be able to understand what they are seeing without having to translate information. We need to take chances to remove unnecessary artifacts from the task.
Focus: As an education product, our users are their to complete a very specific goal We need to help them focus on that goal and get the software out of the way
Depth: To help with focus, we need to create an experience that feels shallow, in someways more so than it really is.
In considering how to brand Revel, we turned away from our “Pearson Blue” and started to examine some of the covers of our digital texts. From their we built color schemes and are currently working on an algorithm to establish color themes off of the text covers
A concept based on “How to think straight about psychology