Management Concepts is a company that provides professional training for certifications. However, they found the students still struggled with their next job even if they passed the exam. Therefore, Management Concepts designed a new course that also provides activities for practicing soft skills required in learners' future work besides the traditional hard skill contents.

However, learners and instructional designers are still in the old mindset. Learners still focused on memorizing contents. And instructional designers still only have access to hard skill performance. There is no support on what and how to improve soft skills.

With the Learning Dashboards, learners and instructional designers can both check the soft skill mastery level from performance visualization. For learners, skill performance trend helps them identify the weaknesses in each skill. For instructional designers, course effectiveness analysis helps them find the most efficient activity for each skill.

Based on Learning Science, before making any effective changes to a learning experience, we need to first identify the gap between desired learning state and current learning state as the goal of the new experience. Therefore, the goal of our research is to identify:

We first interviewed 12 Subject Matter Experts on what makes a good learner and identified three key traits that tell apart an experienced employee from a novice learner.

We also conducted 4 focus group with 2 teams of instructional designers and 2 teams of potential learners. It turned out that they are not in the same mindset with the experts, which impedes the development of professional skills.

Based on social science, people are naturally attracted to things that are relative to themselves. So ideally highlighting information about soft skill can attract and evoke learners to reflect on their soft skills.

Getting inspiration from the theory, I prototyped for highlighting three kinds of soft skill performance to get the attention of the learners.

I then conducted A/B test with 10 learners to see which option motivates most learners to check the weakness of their professional skills. It turned out that the score trends provides the proper amount of information to attract learners' attention on skill improvement.

Even though the score trend was proved to be effective, there was one common problem that learners asked during the task:

That's when I realized different kind of activities have different difficulty level, it's confusing to put all the activities on one line. Therefore I added a filter to highlight on selected type of activities. And since line chart is inefficient showing different categories, I changed it to the bar chart.

Currently, Instructional Designers can only rely on learning theories to design activities for learners. They are curious about which kind of activity is more effective or the effectiveness of instruction as a whole. So that they can identify the potential problems and iterate the course.

To figure out the best solution to visualize the instruction impact, I facilitated a brainstorming session with the team.

After discussing how each idea could support impact comparison, we extracted three key function:

Taking the insights from the brainstorming session, I delivered this line chart with sidebar filter which allows instructional designers to compare the relationship between versions of instruction and skill improvement.

After testing with 4 instructional designers from our client, I noticed that they are "text people" rather than "data people". So they find it hard to getting expected insights from the chart.

Instead of using chart, I translated the key data points they need to compare into text and reorganized the data as the comparing process. In this way, instructional designers don't have to interpret the chart on their own. They just need to simply follow the structure of the page and read the insights.

At the end of each testing session, we invited participants to rate the system's usability. It turned out that the SUS score of our product raised from 76 to 92.

We also gained appreciation from various stakeholders of our client, from marketing to instructional designers to technicians. And our solution also got approved by the company CTO to be part of their product. Very exciting!

During the 7 months project, we got to know each other and became the best supporter for each other. Even we were assigned different rows, everyone got 100% involved into all the process. I really appreciate this valuable opportunity to conduct interviews, facilitate workshops, sketch out backend solutions and inspect for pixel-perfect frontend development. That's why we can got each others' back and perform as a team during interviews, meetings and presentations.

At the beginning, I chose line chart for showing score trend just based on the basic guidelines. However, the real data is actually confusing when shown with line chart. To avoid the same problem, always check the content before putting a placeholder during prototyping.

Even if enterprise products have many existing layout and patterns, they may not be effective for all kinds of users. We should understand the prior experiences of the target users before landing on any decisions.