Learning is only as good as what surrounds it
the bubble prototype proved developers would show up for gamified learning. i redesigned everything around it, starting from what a learner actually needs to do.
people liked the learning and got lost everywhere else.
learn & earn is where developers complete quests and earn rewards. the prototype validated demand in three months and left a lot of ux debt. navigation was confusing and the structure didn't scale. the whole thing was held together with good intentions.
which made it harder.
we had data, a live prototype and stakeholders who knew exactly where things broke. i talked to technical content, product and community teams, clustered their how-might-we questions and prioritised them together. analytics on sign-ups, drop-off and quest completion said the same thing: too many features doing too much at once.
what does a learner actually need to do?
discover a campaign or pathway, complete tutorials, track rewards. every step had to justify itself against that. each round of prototyping got leaner. showing everything at once overwhelmed people, so content now reveals itself a step at a time.
i ended up looking at old library catalogues.
pathways, modules, tutorials, campaigns and quests all link to each other. catalogue cards that connect across subjects gave me a model for clear parent-child relationships and modular discovery. the final ia cut duplication and gave content creators a structure they could read. discovery started to feel like browsing rather than searching.
two questions i kept asking each sprint.
high impact, lower complexity went first: navigation, learner progress, core content access. multi-community publishing was the big one we pushed back.
it gave people new ideas.
a leaner, cleaner content experience that could scale. i led the pathway system and its nested content before moving to the admin portal, and my teammate took campaigns to completion. afterwards, new requests started coming in.
