Small improvements big impact changes
During the 2025 Open edX Conference in Paris, Yana Lovyagina, Head of Support at Raccoon Gang, gave a powerful presentation titled “Let’s make the Open edX users happy together!”. Her talk surfaced a set of recurring issues that real users face every day when interacting with the Open edX platform. These aren’t deep architectural problems or major failures, they are small usability issues that, despite their size, have a meaningful impact on the user experience.
Although these issues may seem minor, they are often frustrating, discouraging, and create friction in the learning and teaching process. They can erode users’ trust and contribute to the perception that Open edX is buggy or unreliable, even when the core functionality is solid. Precisely because of their size, these issues are often overlooked; they rarely justify a full proposal on their own and tend to linger in the background. Yet their cumulative effect is significant, gradually hurting the platform’s image and hindering broader adoption.
After Yana’s presentation, we at Schema Education decided to collaborate with Raccoon Gang to bring these problems into the community product process. Raccoon Gang brings firsthand insight from years of user support, identifying recurring issues that impact the day-to-day experience, and Schema is working to frame these problems in a way that makes them easier to evaluate and prioritize within the product process, while also dedicating design capacity to explore and propose thoughtful, user-centered solutions.
We believe that staying close to users is essential to guide product development in the right direction. Support teams play a key role in this, acting as a direct bridge to users and offering deep insight into their everyday challenges. That’s why we’re committed to working closely with support teams and launching more collaborative projects with other members of the community.
Below, you’ll find a list of the issues identified. Each one includes a link to a Discuss post. We invite the community to share feedback: whether you’ve faced the same problem, found a workaround, or want to propose a solution, your input will help move these conversations forward.
List of problems:
Lack of Clear Certificate Setup Workflow - In a sample of ~2,000 support requests, about 140 (7%) were related to this issue.