McGraw Hill | Archana Ramakrishnan

A one-stop platform for internal teams at McGraw Hill to learn about product thinking concepts. Features case studies, immersive scenarios, and actionable templates to create personalized paths for the team based on varying levels of time commitment, prior knowledge, experience, role, etc.

School UX Journeys

Helping non-designers intuitively understand the concepts of UX and Product Thinking using a one-stop platform for internal teams at McGraw Hill.

Features case studies, immersive scenarios, and actionable templates to create personalized paths for the team based on varying levels of time commitment, prior knowledge, experience, role, etc.

Team

Archana Ramakrishnan, Product Manager, Director of Learning Design, Head of UX @ McGraw Hill

My Role

As the solo designer on this project, I collaborated with the Director of Learning Design and Product Manager on design decisions to achieve the client’s objectives.

Created Impact

I built the end-to-end UX of a website that reached an internal team of 200+ people

Led Design Direction

Collaborated and engaged in discussion with the Director of Learning Design

Built Prototypes

I built many divergent options of solutions and content design for quick testing

Content Design

I created compelling content for the website that increased user engagement

Context

In the past decade, McGraw Hill has made a huge shift into digital products, services and innovation. As one of the leading educational publishing company, they recognized the need to keep up with the growing trends of the modern world to remain a leader in the field.

THE GOAL

A Need to Step Up the Internal Team's Product Thinking Skills

An internal team realized that could improve their outcomes by adopting practices of Continuous Discovery, and a Product Thinking mindset- where every step of their work is customer-centric, and research-backed product.

McGraw Hill, a leader in learning, needed a learning experience to elevate their work- which was a problem space with immense potential.

THE PROBLEM

Barriers of Navigation, Time & Relevance

Navigational Challenge

Amongst all the shared resources the team had, there was immense difficulty in finding files and templates that would apply to their use cases/various parts of the process.

Tight Timelines

Innovation is always bound by sprint timelines and quarterly releases. The McGraw Hill team needed a resource that enabled growth regardless of tough time constraints.

Awareness of Relevance

Since there was an unfamiliarity with using a product thinking hat in their work, there was a need to show its relevance in each individual's role and how it would boost their results.

KEY RESEARCH QUESTION

How might the team members pick a path that is best for them?

In the internal team, every member came from a different background. They had different motivations, skills and experience levels, but they were all motivated by the same mission.

Which made me wonder..

What kind of an experience might allow diverse individuals to learn about discovery and product thinking concepts?

How could they build a connection and relevance to their roles and mission of work in the educational publishing industry?

Opportunity

Understanding how learning could help them in their day-to-day work required some self-exploration and introspection on their part. To support this exploration and reflection, I designed an exploratory experience for growth- one that offers choice and flexibility.

Due to the constraints of the budget and short timeline, I designed a working prototype on Notion. This helped communicate the design direction effectively and helped me showcase my creativity, flexibility and adaptability.

KEY DESIGN DIRECTION

Building a Space for Exploratory Learning

The final solution was built around the key idea of creating a structure of choices that would lead to interconnected experiences. All of these mini-experiences would connected back to the user's background and current work. By doing so, I was able to provide a personalized and engaging experience that would resonate with every member of the team at McGraw Hill.

Solution

An Exploratory Journey: Choosing a Unique Path to Learn

School UX Journeys is a dedicated space for users to step away from their daily routine and learn something new. It is one-stop learning hub that provides case studies, immersive scenarios, and actionable templates to learn about product thinking, personalized based on varying levels of time commitment, prior knowledge, experience, role, etc.

The platform provides the freedom of choice to users with:

bite-sized learning during a coffee break
deeper dive learning using scenario based concept descriptions
actionable learning that they can take toward applying the concepts to their work

This project started out with the team wanting individual artifacts, but I chose to weave together into a cohesive experience. I built it on a no-code tool like Notion, as the team was low on budget and it ensured the website was lightweight and easy to maintain in the future.

Visit the Website

Providing the freedom of choice to cater to varying user needs

This speaks to the need for a unified experience that resonated with everyone, regardless of their department or experience level.

Using personification to draw a connection and relevance to the user's personal growth

I utilized different personas to help users reflect on where they are in their learning journeys and which experiences might be most beneficial to them.

Making concepts concrete through the power of storytelling

I used a storytelling approach to how leaders in different industries used product thinking to tackle a problem and highlighted the methods they used

Digestible experiences to teach key concepts effectively

I created snapshots of methods and concepts across the four phases of the double diamond process to explain the definition, benefits and quick how-to.

Creating intuitive connections to tackle information overload

Since there was an unclear order of operations with the existing resources and templates they had in their internal file manager, I created logical links between the different mini experiences and used the double diamond framework as a guide to indicate where in the discovery process they were.

Here's how the mini experiences were connected:

Archana Ramakrishnan