Udemy

“I appreciated their flexibility and responsiveness to our changing needs."

Kristin Yamauchi

Product Manager at Udemy

The Challenge

Udemy is an online marketplace for learning and teaching that has garnered over 80,000 courses and 24 million students globally. Instructors come to the platform to create content and share their expert knowledge of a topic, while students come to the platform to learn a new skill by consuming the instructor-created videos.

Udemy’s robust web platform supports both instructor-facing and student-facing dashboards and tools to help each user type succeed. However, the mobile app version of the platform only has a student side, allowing them to purchase courses and watch videos. Udemy’s goal in working with us was to create the instructor side of the mobile app, focusing on communication with the students in their courses.

The Process

In order to streamline the instructor-facing portion of the app, we needed to understand instructors’ current workflows on the web platform when interacting with students. We interviewed 8 instructors, whose classes ranged from high volume sizes of 10,000 or more to smaller classes of 10-20. Each type of instructor had different ways of using the platform to communicate with students, and different needs for the mobile version. It was essential for us to cater the app to both the high-volume instructors and smaller-scale instructors to make sure everyone’s preferred workflows were included.

The Solution

The final product works well for all instructor types, and is available for all mobile phone and tablet devices. By making the product inclusive, our vision of streamlining instructor to student communication on a mobile app can be reached globally.

Instructor Inputs

The Result

The new instructor side is currently available in the Udemy mobile app. Instructors can easily view, filter, and reply to messages and questions from their students while on-the-go.

Customization Settings: Features like push notifications and communication channel preferences were incorporated in the app.
Quick Response Feature: Instructors can write certain reponses before hand to save time in repeating the same answers to multiple students.
Filter Options: Instructors can use filters to scan through a lot of messages quickly.