Udemy Instructor App

The Approach

In order to create an optimized experience for the instructor, we needed to understand the most common ways instructors interact with their students, how often they interact, and what their workflows are like. The Udemy team booked us interviews with 8 of their current instructors, ranging from some of their most popular ones with tens of thousands of students at a time, to some very niche instructors who have intimate classes of 20 or less. After getting a solid understanding of how instructors communicate with students through Udemy, I built a robust InVision prototype to test with them. We did a round of testing, and I iterated the design accordingly to make a streamlined instructor side that isn't weighed down by feature bloat.

Key Takeaways

1. During our initial instructor interviews, we found that instructors with extremely large class sizes log into Udemy on their own to check their communication channels. Because their classes are so large, they know they will have new student posts every day and usually check multiple times throughout the day. For instructors with smaller class sizes, they rely on email notifications as an entry point to check their communication channels because they may not receive posts from students every day. This validated our assumption that the ability to customize push notifications would be an important feature for the different levels of instructors.
2. While interviewing the instructors, we found that many of them brought up the idea of "canned responses". Instructors found that they end up typing the same replies over and over to studnts, and would like the ability to create response templates for common questions that students ask. We built this feature into the app for both direct messages and the Q&A section. We further validated this feature when testing the InVision prototype with instructors. They all reiterated the importance of canned responses to help increase their productivity and save them from typing redundant replies.
3. Because some instructors like to go into their account and check all communication tabs and some only go into Udemy when they receive a notification from a student, we wanted to account for both workflows on the app's main feed. Keeping this in mind, I drafted a sitemap of the app, displaying how we could utilize tabs to quickly and easily go from viewing all messages to filtering by message type in one tap. Once the sitemap was finalized, I moved forward in designing the UI using Udemy's style guide, incorporating pre-existing components where I could for consistency.

Final Design

The new instructor side of the app opens up opportunities for instructor to student communication. Instructors can interact with their students without being tied to their desktop computers, and can respond at their leisure. Although instructors with high volume classes and instructors with smaller classes had different needs, the app is streamlined for both user types. Robust filtering and canned responses increase productivity for instructors so they can respond to students quickly and efficiently. Because a mobile app can blur the line between work day and free time, instructors can customize when and how they will receive push notifications.