<aside> 🧙🏻‍♂️ Create by Winuall is a product that lets you create online courses, test series, webinars, etc. from one single dashboard and publish them as products on your own Marketplace. In 2021, we set out to redesign the product to make it a delightful, modern app that works well for everyone.

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As a company, Winuall provides a white-labeled digital platform for tutors and coaching centers. Imagine you as a tutor in the digital era, and would need a plethora of tools to conduct classes online viz. WhatsApp for messaging and class groups, Google Classroom for managing assignments and tests, some other platform to conduct quizzes, Zoom for your live classes, and so on. Winuall bundles all these essentials and gives you a single dashboard to run your institution online.

<aside> 📰 We shared a sneak peek of the platform with some folks, and landed us on this Yahoo Finance article here

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The Problem

When I joined the team in December 2020, Winuall already had a product called "Marketplace", which was being beta tested as an extension of the main SaaS Dashboard that we already had. The main objective behind the Marketplace was to give our customers a storefront to sell the courses that they wanted to build with the content that they had built up over time.

The Dashboard, January 2021

Dashboard, June 2021

While the initial tests were extremely encouraging, there were key problems that we needed to address on priority -

• The product used dated UI paradigms with critical usability issues,
• Most experiences over time became a kitchen sink of an incoherent IA and complex controls, with abstruse jargon in its copywriting - resulting in frequent clogging of our support channels

<aside> 🦄 To understand the finer specifics of what was working and what needed to be tweaked, we conducted a 3-step process - 1️⃣ We identified the major bottlenecks by scanning through the support channel logs (this was the most time-consuming part) 2️⃣ ****We talked with around 7 users about the issues they are facing and what they would change if they had control over this project (the reaction was kind of a bummer given our test users are not super tech-savvy, but one interesting insight here came from a couple of tutors - "Why can I not make these courses in my Office Word?") 3️⃣ We identified newer folks who were potential customers, and we scheduled a walkthrough with them, both with the old flow and the newer prototypes. This exercise was extremely useful as - a. We got a fresh set of eyes (zero-bias), and potential customers. b. Around 70% of this group of 6 remained through 5 phases of iterations, hence we kept getting consistent feedback.

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A few other considerations came into the picture before we finally could embark on the redesign. The products cater mainly to tutors. In India, most of the middle-aged demographic who provide tuitions are tech-literate but not savvy. Parallelly, we also wanted to target the younger and the more tech-savvy demographic, because -

• Tuitions are the most common side gig for young students. This is how most of us had started earning.
• The Creator economy boom meant that focusing purely on academics would not just work. We also wanted to cater to other fields, and we already had a sizeable user base who taught music, or arts, or yoga, and were keen on using the course builder.

<aside> 🦄 To compensate for this added target group, we identified around 12 prospects and had them tell us all they would expect from a course builder catered towards fine and performing arts, non-academic exercises. Once we knew their expectations, we repeated a similar exercise as mentioned above - we made small adjustments to our existing prototypes and did a walkthrough with the prospects. It took us around 2-3 feedback cycles to nail the experience (or at least, for the time being).

PS - There was also a fair bit of snooping on competing products involved.

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