Context

When I joined, Lyearn served as a LMS ( Learning Management Solution) and aimed to help companies in up-skilling their employees. One of its key feature was “Sessions”.

What was a Session?

A session was a way for employees to connect & interact in a virtual meeting room. Think of Zoom, Google Meet, etc.

As “Sessions” or “Live Session” (as we called on the platform) was an existing feature, all the flows & visuals were already in place. Here’s a top level view to make you aware of the the type of users & screens involved in the flow:

Now, that we’ve established a good understanding around “Live Sessions”, let’s dive into how I grew this feature and enhanced user convenience.

Please note: Each feature that follows were a complete project in themselves. However, to keep this case study consumable, I’ll be highlighting only the main points for each.

01 — Offline Sessions

For most clients, Lyearn was the source of truth to measure — how much did their employees learn. However, one of the major issues that the users faced was that there was no way of tracking the in-person events attended by employees, thus missing out on some crucial information.

To address this use case, we introduced Offline Sessions — a dedicated solution for maintaining a record of in-person events within Lyearn.

Here are the final designs that were implemented:

02 — Webinars

One of our clients told us about their need to host a session where learners are not allowed to use microphones and cameras, unless specifically granted by the instructor.

Well, for us this simply meant, live sessions but with limited interactivity. This was a low hanging fruit.

Here are the final designs that were implemented:

Now, with “Bring on Stage” feature in place, a webinar could very easily be converted into a group live session.

To inhibit this behaviour and maintain the difference between the two types of live sessions, we restricted the on-stage user count to 9 only (we were being a bit liberal here as we knew that lakhs of learners will be attending every webinar)

Similar to offline session, I updated the session detail page with necessary information to avoid confusion around the type of live session.

03 — External Sessions

Companies often organize events involving external participants, but given Lyearn’s business model, we couldn’t allow access to external people, thus missing the opportunity to:

• Increase feature usage
• Put our product in front of other possible clients

As a result, our clients had to resort to using alternative tools for hosting such sessions. Although this provided a solution, it brought in the challenge of collating the session data from different tools in order to accurately measure “how much did the employee learn”.

To solve for thise user problem, talents PMs and Senior Designers at Lyearn collaborated and came up with the concept of “External Sessions”. It allowed our clients to easily manage all their sessions within Lyearn itself, irrespective of the platform they were hosted on.

Here are the final designs that were implemented:

Well! That was all about the types of sessions but there’s more!

Introducing recurrence in Sessions

Companies frequently conduct sessions, and often, session details remain unchanged. However, a new session must be created even for a slight timing variation. This led to a tedious and repetitive process, despite the availability of the ‘Duplicate’ feature. As a response to this inconvenience, our clients approached us with a request for an automated session scheduling solution.

To meet our clients’ needs, we introduced a simple toggle setting that allowed any session to be scheduled as recurring. While the concept itself was straightforward, the implementation required some modifications.

Here are the designs that were implemented:

When a session was set to recur, a few more settings appeared dynamically at different places in the form.

1. Whether to allow learners to register in multiple occurrences of the session or not
2. How to calculate the completion of the entire session (inlusive of all occurrences)

As you might be already aware or have guessed by now is that clicking on the list items would take the admins to the session’s detail page. However, these detail pages would be of a particular occurrence. Correct? So then, how to access the parent session of these occurrences?

Okay, now that we have the entry points in place, let’s talk about their detail page. Yes, you read it right — there is only one detail page for both entry points.

Initially, I also thought of having 2 detail pages:

• For individual occurrences, existing detail pages of each session type could be used.
• For the parent session, I could design a new one and would make sure to give a way for admins to go to the occurrences’ detail pages.

However, after some discussion with a senior designer, I realised that nesting the occurrences within the parent session would cause a lot of navigation friction and thus decided to mould the current detail page in a way that it works for both. Here’s how I did it:

We’ve reached the end of Admin end changes for recurring session but there’s one small thing that calls for attention.

Cancelling a recurring session. It might seem straightforward but there were a few cases to cover.

• Cancel an occurrence
• Cancel the entire session with all its occurrences
• Cancel the current occurrence and the occurrence post the current one

Here’s how I designed a modal for the same:

Now, let’s talk about the learner end for a bit.

With “multi-slot registration” setting in place, edge cases appeared.

What shall we do if the multi-slot registration is not allowed and the learner has already registered in one of the occurrences? We could not just remove the “Register button” as that would seem buggy. Here’s how we went about solving it:

That’s all for the overview of each feature. A lot of iterations went into bringing these features to life. Care was given into designing error & truncation states, email & in-app notifications, copies for different settings & handling edge cases.

Impact

While I do not have any numbers to support but this feature expansion:

• Brought Lyearn closer to being at par with its competitors
• Made session management convenient for our users

Takeaways & Learnings

Owning ‘Sessions’ for 2 years was a journey filled with excitement, iterations, reviews, frustrations, and valuable learnings. Here are some highlights from that experience:

• Consider both your product’s information architecture and the user’s journey to identify the right touchpoint(s) for a feature.
• Mapping the user’s journey can uncover overlooked use cases

Conclusion

To wrap things up, my experience with “Sessions” gave me a profound understanding of how a real business operates. It revealed the delicate art of balancing customer satisfaction with business viability. This project allowed me to ship several 0–1 features and made me the go-to person for any session-related design requirement.

Lastly, I want to extend a big shout-out to my fantastic design manager, Suhani Ashok, at Lyearn. Her ongoing guidance and unwavering support made taking on the “Sessions” project possible in the first place. Kudos to her!

Thanks for reading it till the end. Appreciate it!