Learner Management

Overview

CBT Nuggets delivers IT, project management, and office-productivity training via streaming video to individuals and over 100 enterprise clients across the U.S. In May 2018, I partnered with fellow product designer Marlon Rábago to lead the design of Learner Management — giving enterprise admins a fast, organized way to manage large learner populations. My design work ran through the summer of 2018; the platform was built and shipped over the following year, launching in October 2019.

The challenge

Picture a training admin at a company the size of Google, managing 10,000+ learners: monitoring progress, assigning material, and keeping an active roster — with none of the tooling to do it efficiently. I kicked off the project with 15 interviews with enterprise admins and 2 CBT Nuggets customer support stakeholders, then scoped an MVP against a 6-month implementation timeline.

The research surfaced a structural gap: every learner on an enterprise account lived in one flat group, admin pages slowed down at scale, and admins lacked the data to actually manage their teams. About 63% of managers and HR staff were requesting access to training data they couldn't get — routing everything through admin-filed tickets instead.

Approach

My key move was introducing a new role — group admins — so managers and HR could create groups, build custom playlists, and assign training directly, without waiting on a central admin. I tested high-fidelity prototypes with 14 admin clients over multiple rounds (InVision/Sketch, then a semi-functional UI), and defined the post-launch A/B testing plan to keep validating the roadmap.

I also stood up CBT Nuggets' first design operations process — a customized design-sprint model piloted on this project — giving stakeholders, developers, and the design team a shared, transparent way to track progress through a project too big to ship in one pass.

Impact

My design work closed in under 3 months despite the scope; the last two figures are what the platform went on to report after its October 2019 launch. The new design-operations model outlived the project — becoming how CBT Nuggets' design team collaborated with stakeholders going forward.