Pluralsight Gamification & Onboarding

Full-Time Product Designer

Gamification - Product Design

During my time at Pluralsight, I worked as a Gamification and Onboarding designer specializing in creating experiences that welcome and delight users from their first touchpoint through their full adoption of the product. I consulted with different teams in all areas of the product to help boost engagement and introduce game mechanics to push user and business goals (sales, marketing, tech foundations, native, CSM leads, research, home, and more). As part of this work, I paired with our research team to interview current managers using our products as well as new users to audit and enhance our engagement methodologies. These findings were then synthesized and shared internally to support top business initiatives. I also developed a plan to integrate two different game mechanic frameworks when we acquired A Cloud Guru and worked with my developers to launch these updates on a tight timeline (while also updating all of our product assets to a new design system).

Project Type

Full-time In-house

Role

Gamification Specialist, Onboarding Specialist, Product Design

Tools

Figma, Lucid, Jira, Usertesting, Confluence, Adobe Suite, InVision

Gamification - Activity Feed

The activity feed was developed in order to solve an experience disconnect between learners and managers in Pluralsight’s product, which was discovered through user testing done by Pluralsight’s research team. Learners were having trouble finding intrinsic motivation in the platform, and managers were struggling to understand their team members’ progress and license usage. My team designed the activity feed in order to give managers visibility into learner updates and to allow them to respond individually or to multiple team members at once. The goal of this is to create greater motivation in the product for learners, by increasing visibility and social engagement within the experience.

I began this project by conducting informational interviews with current managers and admins using Pluralsight’s product. From these initial conversations, it became clear that managers using this product have a wide variety of needs, some with very few points of overlap. Some users wanted to set targeted learning goals and track daily progress towards a shared initiative, while others wanted to check in monthly to view unused licenses and see users ranked in a specific skill set. I decided to move forward with a slim MVP that met all basic user nears, and then map out future releases with expanded features. This would allow us to 1. make a strong product that was immediately useful to our users, and 2. have a clear plan of what we could implement next with the added bonus of real-world feedback from our users. While we can usually predict some user needs from preliminary testing, sometimes users develop new and unexpected ways of using our products, and we could tap into this knowledge as we continue to build the product. This dynamic product plan was purposefully flexible, as the needs of our users were so diverse that this approach would allow us to remain fluid without boxing in predicted use cases.

As this product is still in development I can’t share expanded product images on my website, but I can share prototypes and more images over zoom. Or google meets. Whatever we’re using these days 💁‍♀️ .

  • Home Screen

    This is a full view of the activity feed. This consists of the middle section (the list of learner updates) and the right section (an engagement component).

    The way the list works is that any update that can be grouped is consolidated into one card. That means that if two learners earn the same badge or complete the same course, it becomes a group card instead of an individual card. This helps keep the page less cluttered and more understandable.

  • Update Cards

    User testing showed that “nudge” updates are the most important to managers, so these are always filtered to the top. Nudges are shown whenever a learner needs a push, like if they haven’t used their license or haven’t signed in for a few months.

  • Learner Engagement

    The purpose of this component is to highlight learners who haven’t been receiving interactions. Some managers have teams of 30+ people, so an easy view of who had and hadn’t gotten feedback was critical in order to maintain learner motivation.

  • New List Item

    Description goes here

Tech Foundations

When a new learning program, Tech Foundations, was introduced this year I was asked to help create a light custom gamification framework to support learner motivation. Tech Foundations was designed to provide bite-sized content across 12 topics including agile, cloud computing, platforms, extended reality and the metaverse, automation, data, security and more.

I began working on this project by interviewing different internal teams, learners and managers who would be using our product, and even the authors of the new courses. It became clear that Tech Foundations had very different requirements from our current learning pathways, especially since it was a set list of short courses versus a huge library of long format programs.

I learned from my conversations with the team leading the tech foundations effort that learner progress through the course as well as understanding their overall completion goal was a roadblock for test users. Originally we were just asked to design a supporting set of new badges, but I thought that creating a fill-in-the-blank “badge progress” widget could be a great opportunity to add help learners understand overall completion as well as view new badges on the homepage. Because the list of courses a learner would have access to was preset by their manager instead of self-chosen, I was able to use a more direct approach to the learning journey and earnable badges than I normally was. In this design, learners would work towards completing the full “set” of completion badges (earned after they finished a video/assessment) to complete the badge and unlock a premium course of their choosing. The purpose of this design is to 1. create a more guided learning journey for learners, as they can see what courses have yet to be completed and 2. add a more engaging element to an otherwise stark page. We tested this new widget against a more simplified framework, and it tested by far the best in both learner engagement as well as product understanding.

I also began by working with our engineers to create a customized trophy case that only showed earnable badges and hid those outside of the programs bounds in order to not demotivate our users. This work would also allow us to customize the trophy case for different SKU types in the future as we moved towards integration.

Finally, I designed a set of 12 custom badges in Illustrator that matched the new gem icons that had been used to represent the courses. These badges match the rest of the Pluralsight’s badges, and are designed using a specific brand guideline with about 15 overlay layer effects (flexing my design skills from my graphic design days).

  • Custom Badge Widget

    This visual shows home screen for Tech Foundations. The user experience for this program lives here, as they don’t have access to the full catalog of content nor full product experience. The new badge widget can be shown on the bottom right, and is titled “My Progress”.

  • New Custom Badge Designs

    I designed these new badges for tech foundations (circles) based on the icons provided by the program team (hexagons).

  • Updated Trophy Case

    The new badges for Tech Foundations were created into a new block that is added whenever a user has the correct program SKU. Along with this, those users will also receive customized content in the rest of the trophy case that cuts out more extensive badges that might decrease their motivation. For example, a learner that can only access 20 hours of video doesn’t need to be seeing a badge for watching 100+ hours of content at this point.

Integration with A Cloud Guru

While I was at Pluralsight, they were in the middle of integration with a newly purchased Australian company, A Cloud Guru. This learning platform was cloud specific, and would be fully integrated into our current product, which also meant significantly updating the current product to accommodate this.

As the gamification and onboarding specialist, I created a plan to integrate these two different game mechanic frameworks and worked with my developers to launch these updates on a tight timeline (while also updating all of our product assets to a new design system). I started this work by conducting informational interviews with learners using the ACG platform to get a better idea of how they were understanding the current system. This revealed weakness around their points system, which we decided to cut out of the new MVP. Out of 13 learners, no one actually understood what they meant, and the way that the forums were ranked was misleading to users. We also learned that the ACG community forums were one of the most critical elements for their users, so this is something that we decided to highlight when we brought it into the new product by giving forums their own section on the homepage. I also worked with the internal and Australia team to design and test new badges that were target towards new learner goals for the Cloud space.

The primary components of this updated system were learner goal targeted badges, a unified gamification framework, forum integration and gamification, and creating a custom widget for cloud badges on the home page similar to the tech foundations widget. This involved close and continuous collaboration with the overall product team, multiple rounds of user testing, coordinating with our new product partners, and working with my developers to launch these updates on a tight timeline (while also updating all of our product assets to a new design system).

On the onboarding side of things, I worked with multiple teams to design and test out new onboarding flows for 10+ user groups. The messaging I wrote for these updated screens was dependent on where the user was coming from, what their learning goals were, and what information they had been previously expoed to. We also mapped out work to use machine learning to customize their home page based on their answers in the onboarding process

As this launch is still in progress visuals can’t be shared at this time. However, in the meantime I can share some kind Linkedin words from the team members I worked on this project with:

NEXT

BillGO