With more and more people having easy internet access these days, online learning has become a popular way for people to reach their academic and career goals. Founded in 2012, Coursera has gained huge success with over 90 million registered users from over 200 countries. The average rating of course on Coursera is 4.7 out of 5 and 93% of Coursera learners say they would recommend the platform to their friends. Moreover, since the pandemic, Coursera has seen a 450% increase in the number of enrollments in 2020, and the trend of virtual learning continues to grow at a fast pace.

However, among the 92 million students on Coursera, only 20% of them use mobile only and the majority of them have expressed that they have a much better experience accessing Coursera through the website than the native app. While increasingly more people take advantage of their mobile phones and want to study on their phones utilizing the fragmented time during the day, Coursera is losing its chance to support its users with a good mobile experience.

To better understand the users' pain points, I looked through Coursera on Google Play Store which had 130K+ reviews and identified some of the major issues mentioned by the users:
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To get a better understanding of user behaviors, I conducted one-to-one usability tests with 3 users who had known and registered for Coursera before but somehow did not end up using it. My goal was to find some insights to improve the app by observing the user experience of these "disappointed users."
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Pre-Task Questions:‍

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Tasks:‍

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Insights
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After the research stage, I compiled all the pain points identified and started to group similar ones. At last, the pain points were grouped into two categories of experience, one about course finding and the other about course taking. Within the two groups, pain points were further divided into subsections according to the app's interfaces. This mapping gave me a more clear vision of what to improve and redesign in order to benefit users.

After the research and brainstorming, I completed the redesign based on optimizing the two major experiences identified in the ideation stage.

Since Explore is the place where users spend time finding the courses they want, the app could only satisfy its users by capturing the users' preferences. Therefore, I asked 8 participants to do a card sorting on how they would prioritize different course suggestions displayed on the Explore page and redesigned the Explore page accordingly.

In the research stage, many users expressed their confusion with the wording Coursera had used in the app. This causes troubles especially during the enrollment process which involves purchase actions. Therefore, to give the users a better and more assured experience enrolling in courses, I decided to do a button testing with some users for the CTA buttons in the course enroll page so that confusion and mistakes could be better avoided.

Finding the balance between the similarity and differences of desktop and mobile design is important.
Doing this case study gave me a better sense of how to design a mobile application adapted from the website. On the one hand, it is always a priority to keep the consistency between the website and app. On the other hand, the app should consider the unique experience of mobile users which could be very different from desktop access. We should never let the users have that feeling of "ok, I'll just go back to the website." A good app experience not only gives existing users the new choice to use the mobile device for learning, but also attracts new users who are more "smartphone-only."

Information can become a burden for the users if not properly presented.
Information can become overwhelming when the contents are dense and heavy, it is easy for the company to pour all the information to the users at once. However, user experience is always the first priority. How to make information organized and easy for users to digest is a key to success.