Simon Ker, Product Designer | Torke Online Academy Case Study

Ford Learning Centre

The Brief: Reimagine and rebuild the front-end of Ford of Europe's internal learning management system.

Designing a better learning experience for Ford

During the Summer of 2019, The Virtual Forge were asked by Ford of Europe to reimagine and rebuild the front-end of their internal learning management system. The current solution, STARS, was thought to be overly complex, uninspiring and generally out-of-date with modern UI and UX standards, criticisms that were later explored and justified by evidence that we gathered during UX testing.

We had previously won a tender with Ford to design a concept for a mobile application, Ford Fuel, that would be used to motivate Ford employees to engage proactively with their training. However, during this process it became clear that in order for Ford Fuel to be effective, we would first have to make improvements to the underlying STARS platform.

In Europe, the target market for this project, STARS is currently used by 45,540 learners that, on average, access 22 items of learning through the system each year.

But First The Budget!

In order to gain buy-in and budget to complete the full product delivery, from stakeholders at Ford, our initial task was to demonstrate that we could deliver a solution that would produce measurable improvements for the users of the system.

The Approach

The Process We Followed

We wanted to show the team at Ford how facilitated workshops, followed by focussed prototyping and testing, could deliver not only the measurable results that they were looking for, but also a shared understanding between team members about what we were trying to achieve and what the users of the product essentially wanted to get out of their experiences.

Step 1 - Discovery

Understand the problems, the goals and the plan of action.

Step 2 - Conceptualise

Create a clickable high fidelity prototype of our concept.

Step 3 - Test

Give our prototype to users, gain insights into their behaviour and opinions.

Step 4 - Analysis

Take what we learned and use it to learn, improve and strategise.

Step 1

Kick-off Workshop with Ford of Europe stakeholder team

This workshop was run by myself, supported by a Business Analyst and a UX Designer. Note and vote exercises and user journey mapping were used to identify key users, business goals and requirements, and to explore and prioritise enhancements to the UI and UX that would deliver the most value in terms of overall efficiency and experience for the users.

Key areas identified to pay particular attention to were:

Core learning experience for learners

There is no consolidated view of all outstanding learning
There is no easy way to see learning that i’ve completed
There is no way to easily see which learning items are compulsory and which are optional

Optional learning experience for learners

It isn’t easy to find and complete learning that hasn’t been mandated by a manager
Users generally don’t use the system for anything other than compulsory learning despite there being a general learning and information directory

Learning asset creation for admin users

The current system of creating e-learning, assessments and exams is way too complicated. It’s so unintuitive to use that Learner Administrators required 8 hours of training to use it

General Comments

Users have no sense of direction when using the system
- There is no obvious hierarchy to the information in the system
- There is no sign-posting to help users navigate the UI
The UI is very old fashioned and unusable on mobile devices

During this session we produced a number of wireframe sketches, user stories and a list of prioritised product enhancements that would form the basis of our first prototype.

Step 2

Developing an Initial Prototype

In order to verify the severity of problems identified in the kick-off workshop and to attempt to streamline some of the processes that users are currently having trouble with, we set about developing a prototype of our proposed solution that would be used during face-to-face UX testing.

We built our prototype in Adobe XD and focused only on the screens required to explore the main issues raised so far. We also wanted to provide quantitative evidence to illustrate any measurable improvements to the experience of learners whilst using our solution and secure funding for the full project from Ford of Europe.

Step 3

User Testing

We ran a series of face-to-face UX tests at Ford dealerships in Amsterdam, Rome, Berlin and Warsaw.

User Testing Continued

We asked the users to perform a number of tasks on both the existing STARS system and our prototype. During the tests they spoke aloud their thoughts so that we could analyse recordings of the tests afterwards and highlight any interesting insights to Ford. We also asked our test subjects a number of questions aimed at gathering qualitative evidence to ultimately support our solution and justify the funding of the project.

We aimed to test 5 Learners and any Learner Administrators that we could get our hands on during each study (on average we tested between 2 & 3 Learner Admins).

The tests were carried out 2 weeks apart which gave us time to analyse results and make minor amendments to the prototype between each test.

Step 4

The Results of Testing

Starting on a positive foot and getting the go-ahead for the full delivery

Results gathered during the tests were, on the whole, comparable throughout the study despite the minor changes in between tests. We used the timed tasks to extrapolate representative time savings for each market and for Europe as a whole. We were also able to present positive qualitative results across all of our test users.

It could be argued that the bar for improvement was set fairly low by STARS but, in addition to gathering data to present to stakeholders, another important aim of this initial round of design was to demonstrate an effective and workable relationship between The Virtual Forge and Ford of Europe.

Outcome summary:

The tasks undertaken by testers were designed to be representative of a user's typical interaction with the system from logging in to launching 1 item of e-learning (this takes the user to an external e-learning player which was out of the scope of the project):

Show us how you would view your current curriculum
Show us how you would find out which courses are still pending
Show us how you would view which courses are complete
Show us how you would view the details of an outstanding learning item
Show us how you would launch an outstanding learning item (this was a surprisingly complicated step in the process)

The average STARS user completes 22 items of learning each year.

141 s

On average users saved 141 seconds each when performing the tasks on our prototype.

100 %

Said that their experience was better or much better compared to STARS

4043 hrs

saved by dealers across Europe based on our limited set of tasks alone.

It wasn’t all plain sailing

“Show us how you would view which courses are complete”

After the first round of testing in Rome we discovered that we had underestimated how important the training history page is to users in the current system.

Our tests revealed that the initial prototype of the Ford Learning Centre had actually slowed users down when performing this task and talking to our test subjects revealed that this was one of three main tasks that learners currently performed with STARS on a frequent basis.

“When we use STARS it is because we have been told [to do so] by our manager. Either to find out training we didn’t do yet, what we have finished or to do some training”

Sales Executive Ford Rome

“It is always last minute, when our manager's boss is asking the departments if they have reached their targets”

CV Technician Ford Rome

But we fixed it!

We took these insights away with us and redesigned the Learner History UI to reflect it’s true hierarchy in the UI. The redesigned prototype resulted in improved completion times and eliminated any negative comments or confusion.

These comments also highlighted a trend that we found to be consistent across all markets, that Line managers would manually collect learning data rather than access the STARS Reporting Platform as expected. (Sadly the STARS Reporting Platform is also out of scope for this project).

Success!

The Virtual Forge was given the go ahead to proceed with full delivery of the Ford Learning Center after presenting to Ford of Europe in December 2019.

Current Focus

Building Certifications for Different Job Roles

Since getting budget approval for the full project, delivery has been progressing with our development team. They have been focused on gathering technical requirements, identifying services offered by the STARS system that can be plugged into and planning functionality to bridge the gap between what STARS can currently support and what Ford of Europe are requesting.

Design work has, however, been continuing most notably around the “Certification Builder”, a UI used by Learner Admins to create curriculums for different job roles. This was identified by Learner Admins as the most frustrating aspect of STARS.