Learning community

Designing an end-to-end learning community platform for digital producers inside of a member’s area (2022-2023)

Overview

Hotmart is the leading platform in Brazil for selling and distributing digital products, such as online courses, e-books, podcasts, and more, with +4,4 million students using the members area Hotmart Club.

I’ve worked on designing a learning community where the goal was to facilitate and enhance the learning process by allowing product consumers to connect with other students and digital producers.

Role

Product Design; User Experience; Strategy; Prototyping; Research and Usability testing; Data analysis.

Type

Mobile app (iOS, Android); Webapp

The projects listed below are under confidential agreement and some information can not be disclosed.

The Problem

When I arrived to work on this project, with business goals and main strategy already defined, I started with the following challenge:

Help consumers (students) during their learning journey.

Main problems in the previous scenario:

  • The member's area that holds the products didn’t have incentives for the students

  • The previous Community platform was separated from the course environment

  • Online course completion rate

  • The refund rate was higher than expected

The Process

01/ Building the MVP

To design the MVP, we recovered all the research data related to the previous platform and collected the main flows of market competitors using benchmarks to discover opportunities for our product.

New research focused on the business goals was conducted by the UX research team. We also studied how other content creation platforms work, that are not direct competitors such as discussion forums and social networks. After the definition of the concept, we explored innovative ideas that would expand the use of the community.

Then, we sketched and iterated possible solutions for the MVP using the company’s Design System and also creating new local components to meet new needs. I’ve conducted some usability tests and interviews with the UX research team to validate usability and the value proposition. We came up with a solution that allowed students and producers to create posts with the option of uploading media such as images and videos, commenting, and creating a connection with the discussions that usually happen in the course videos comments section.

02/ Alpha and Beta tests

During alpha and beta tests, we collected and analyzed data, using Google Analytics and heatmap trackers. We also analyzed recordings that allowed us to discover some use patterns and address bugs and other usability issues.

03/ Growth

Once we validated the MVP, we started to focus on growing the product. We had the goal to increase interactions in the community. At this phase, we built a user flow mapping of the current solution and crossed these data with the user's needs discovered and jobs-to-be-done listed.

We also built an Opportunity Solution Tree to come up with hypotheses and experiments to validate our ideas, and an engagement loop with actions or environments, triggers, and rewards as in the following image (the real data was hidden).

I’ve sketched and prototyped potential solutions, and after refinement and several alignments with business and technology teams, we decided to do A/B tests for some features. Some tests were well succeded and others led us to improvements.

The Solution

A new learning community solution inside the member's area - Hotmart Club - to connect consumers and producers and increase adoption, retention, and engagement.

A community where consumers and producers can create content and interact with others by commenting or reacting with emojis, to solve questions, ask for help, network, and share their progress on studies.

04/ Gamification

Our next goal in growing the community was to form healthy habits for our consumers by accessing, reading, and engaging. We designed several flows to discover internal and environmental triggers to perform the desired action and then we came up with potential reward solutions for the students, like highlighting trending posts.

The Results

Increased engagement and visitor retention in the community were achieved, especially when observing cohort graphs after the launch of features improved using A/B testing data.

+5x

engagement in content creation

+15%

visitor retention in the community