The Learning Bar | Red Thread Innovations

At a glance

The Learning Bar faced challenges with its user experience across its suite of educational products, leading to confusion among its user base – teachers – and preventing them from deriving the full value the products offered. Red Thread Innovations partnered with The Learning Bar to provide a comprehensive discovery and design sprint, with the goals of unifying the user experience, improving internal processes, and creating an interactive prototype demonstrating potential solutions.
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Service: Discovery & Design

Expertise

Product Strategy

UX Research

UI & UX Design

Key Output

Interactive Prototype

Challenge

The Learning Bar’s suite of products lacked a unified customer experience. Poor understanding and discoverability across product lines meant its customers couldn't derive the full value of its ecosystem. Users found the solutions confusing and time-consuming, resulting in high support costs and negatively impacting the perception of The Learning Bar’s brand. Operationally, The Learning Bar was unable to adapt its products to keep up with market demand due to the separation of each product line.

Solution

RTI conducted a comprehensive discovery and design phase to understand Learning Bar's user personas, mapped the current experience, and synthesized insights into actionable recommendations. Our solutions included intuitive onboarding and in-product resources to empower teachers, improved navigation and task flows, and linking data to recommendations teacher could action. We also recommended centralizing product lines into a cohesive platform and implementing a design system to streamline internal processes and accelerate product updates.

Result

Through our design sprint, Red Thread Innovations provided The Learning Bar with meaningful insights and a clear strategic roadmap. The interactive prototype not only unified their suite of educational products but also highlighted opportunities for streamlined operations, improving both teacher engagement and internal workflows. Our design solutions enabled The Learning Bar to envision how they could better support educators by making product features more accessible, reducing support costs, and laying the groundwork for future updates that align with market demands. As a result, The Learning Bar gained a comprehensive direction to enhance both user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

User-Centric Discovery

We started with a comprehensive discovery phase, including persona mapping and definition to understand users deeply, user journey mapping to analyze end-to-end experiences, and customer feedback analysis. This phase also involved extensive product flow mapping for each product line, competitive analysis, and market research.

Key Learnings and Ideation

We extracted key learnings from the discovery phase, driving the opportunity areas and resulting recommendations. These insights formed the basis for collaborative ideation sessions with The Learning Lab team, where high-priority recommendations were narrowed down and translated into tangible solutions. This process transitioned from high-level recommendations to concrete manifestations which would inform solution design and prototyping.

Unifying the Experience

We proposed centralizing The Learning Bar's products to unify the user experience and increase the combined value across the product suite. This involved creating a separation between the application level (application-specific business logic) and the platform level (core technical capabilities), with all data centralized at the platform level. This approach aimed to streamline maintenance and operational efficiency while providing a cohesive user experience across all products.

Motivating Teachers With Streamlined Onboarding & Education

We recommended enhancing the onboarding process and in-product education to continuously communicate the value of The Learning Bar’s products to teachers. This included designing better onboarding mechanisms to help teachers understand the benefits and positive impacts of the products on their classrooms and students, and easier discoverability of features and products so users were aware of the full range of available resources and tools.

Intuitive Navigation and Data-Based Actions

RTI identified issues with navigation and task flows within the product suite. We recommended improving these aspects by creating shortcuts for key actions. We also provided clear links between data and actions teachers could take to facilitate seamless data-based action planning.

Self-Serve Library of Instructional Activities

To empower teachers and reduce operational costs, RTI proposed developing a self-serve library of instructional activities and resources. This library would allow teachers to easily find answers to product and feature related questions, while reducing The Learning Bar’s support costs.

From Ideation to Tangible Solution

We developed an interactive prototype to demonstrate the recommended user experience improvements, including a unified dashboard, student profiles with suggested activities, and a centralized activity library. This prototype aimed to excite stakeholders and provide a clear vision of the future state of the product suite, showcasing the potential for significant enhancements in user experience and operational efficiency.