Content Platform

CHALLENGE
“How can we reduce the amount of time it takes to make, manage, and translate courses and content?”

Final Design

Project
Shaping

Context

Khan Academy is a nonprofit that provides free education for anyone, anywhere. I led several initiatives focused on optimizing the tools used by our content teams to make, manage, and translate courses and content that appear on Khan Academy sites around the world.

Our content team was using 18 different internal Khan Academy tools to create and refresh courses every year. All of these tools were connected to an outdated Content Management System (CMS) that housed the only way to publish any change made from any of the tools.

This made creating and editing content an extremely slow and frustrating process.

Vision

After brainstorming ideas with the team (Eng, PM, and Design), we came up with an overall consolidation vision to deprecate our existing CMS and split up the functionality between 4 new tools.

With this vision, content teams could browse and create courses and content in Khan Library, edit courses and content with Course Editor and Content Editor, and use the Translation Manager to manage translations for all items with more speed and efficiency. We also added the ability to publish from 3 of the new tools to help relieve the bloated publish experience.

Research

Before we could come up with the vision described above, we had to gain a foundational understanding of how the different personas on the content team were actually using our tools. I interviewed 22 content creators and translators around the world to find answers. That effort resulted in several artifacts, the creation of new personas, and a clear list of major pain points that could be reframed into opportunities.

Goals:
  • Gain an understanding of what the team’s processes and workflows look like
  • Determine what on and off-platform tools the team uses and why
  • Understand major pain points and task completion rates
  • Clarify personas and identify overlaps in processes and tasks
Collecting async feedback across time zones through video walkthroughs
Research interview feedback tracking

This research helped us prioritize a new initiative, Khan Library, to help the content team create, browse, and manage courses.

Experiments

Pain Points

  1. To make or edit a course, creators had to publish their entire domain with every course which was a problem because they could accidentally publish someone else’s work that wasn’t ready.
  2. Key information on the status of a course like visibility, publish status, and translation progress were hard to find.
  3. It was hard to quickly see which team/domain different courses belonged to.
  4. Translation managers couldn’t choose to translate just one course. They would first have to import an entire domain with every course from the source locale (EN) which was unreliable and could take more than 24 hrs.
  5. International locales had no way of creating new courses. They could only translate them.

Concepts

Tabs / Keep the primary tools together but separated and default to the new course management tool
Standalone Tool V1 / A separate tool optimized for finding courses or content within a domain
Standalone Tool V2 / Exposed folders and the ability to easily browse across domains

Usability Testing

Async walkthroughs / The content team is spread out across different time zones throughout the world. To accommodate varying work hours, I conducted async interviews, customized for each of our three personas, to get feedback in time to match our roadmap.
Feedback tracking
Synthesis and analysis

Final
Design

Change Highlights

After usability testing, user interviews, and eng feedback, I created designs based off of Concept 3. In this new experience, users would be able to:
  • Create and publish a single course and not have to publish the entire domain
  • Quickly preview what’s in a course without opening it to see high level stats
  • International locales could easily choose which courses to translate and even create new ones
  • See folders they have permission to edit vs folders they can browse
  • Filter or search to quickly find specific courses or content
Default view / Shows all the courses that you have edit access to
Create items from the Library
Search and filter across languages
Preview translation progress / See high-level stats without opening any translation tools
User feedback

Backstage

Backstage

Responsibilities
Research & Testing
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Visual Design
Prototyping
Stakeholder Alignment
Documentation
Product Roadshows
Feature Prioritization
Tools
Figma
Loom
Confluence
JIRA
MURAL
The Team
Designer (me)
Product Manager (1)
Engineers (8)