A New Learner Profile: Reflection & Development Speed (Architecture Theme)

TL;DR: In March we released a new Learner Profile, the first major micro front end built by the Architecture team that relied on infrastructure built in the early FY19 quarters. Learners now have an improved learner profile that will be easier for us to improve in the future as well. This effort took 4.5 weeks of dedicated engineering team time, and many other runway initiatives were done in parallel to support it. More recently, our efforts on the more complex Account Settings page took ~36% less time, and we plan to keep looking at measures like this to track our progress on faster time to product delivery.

Open

Release date: Mid March 2019

Product owner: @Marco Morales (Deactivated)

What is it?

A new learner profile experience helps bring a learner’s certificate history and profile details to life with a new visual layout, improved visibility and privacy controls, as well. This part of the platform is now easier to update moving forward as well.

Key talking points for customers:
Why work on this page?

This page was chosen as a learner facing page with interactivity which would let us advance our runway and infrastructure work all while building new reusable components. Outside of the course experience and learner dashboard this is one of the most visited pages for learners.

Who will notice the change, and where?
Learners can get to their profile from the account dropdown in the top right of our headers on edx.org and courses.edx.org

What impact will it have on learners?

This page loads more quickly, includes tools for learners to set the visibility of specific profile fields, and we’ve already seen learners spending 45% more time on this page interacting with their profile than previously (0:45 → 1:15 average time on page). Previously, about 14% of learners would look at their profile as the last page on edX before exiting or closing their session. Now only about 8% of learners view that page last during a session, meaning more of them continue to another edX page to keep learning or engaging with the site. While we did not add to many new features to the profile page, we hope that it better represents and visualizes your progress than before, making you more likely to return to content or engage with our platform in general.

Results: Our investments into development infrastructure are intended to speed up delivery timelines for teams across edX. One way to measure this is to look at the how many development team weeks it takes to deliver an initiative from start to finish.

• Learner Profile - 4.5 full development team weeks - Our first rebuilt page,

• Account Settings - 2.9 full development team weeks - A project of higher technical complexity than Learner Profile, delivered in ~36% less time than the Profile.

• Order History - 1.5 full development team weeks - A bit simpler than the first two, but getting to delivery timelines that are exciting to see, and that we hope to repeat with other projects soon!
  
  

This data is directional and something we expect to continue to monitor (in addition to performance & page views, etc). Look forward to more charts and visuals for gains in future efforts as we work on our Performance Observability infrastructure!

Credits: Thanks to the Architecture Squad / aka #ArchSquid - @Robert Raposa , @Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated) , @Douglas Hall (Deactivated) , @Adam Butterworth (Deactivated) , @Albemarle (Deactivated) , @David Joy (Deactivated) , and @Darren Domingos (Deactivated) .