Product Brief: Studio Home Redesign

Owned by Jenna Makowski
Last updated: Aug 25, 2023
4 min read

Studio Home Problem Statement:

 

To date, there has not been a clear, consistent or documented strategy for the intended purpose of Studio Home. The goal of this document is to outline the main purpose of Studio Home, whom it serves, and its core functions. This document is intended to inform the UX/UI project to redesign Studio Home.

What is the primary purpose of Studio Home?

Studio Home is the landing page for all Studio Users into the Studio Experience. It is the primary point of entry into the Studio Experience.

Studio Users include course authors, instructional designers, course instructors, course delivery teams, and administrators.

The primary function any user must accomplish when arriving at Studio Home is a quick, intuitive way to view and access all of the courses and all of the libraries that they are able to view and access, based on their role/permissions. 

The key challenge in designing a unified Studio Home experience is that each of these user types will have different levels of access and permissions, which will impact which and how many courses/libraries they see. For example, an admin may view and access all the courses in their organization or instance, while a course staff may only view and access all the courses on which they are a staff member. In its current state, there is no consideration given for the different needs that different users may have in viewing and accessing courses (for example, for users with long lists of courses, there are no navigation or search tools to manage content).

What is the secondary purpose of Studio Home?

There are several secondary functions that some users may need to accomplish when arriving at Studio Home. Currently, these workflows are baked into the Studio Home experience. For example, they may need to:

  1. Create a new course

  2. Create a new library

  3. Create a course run or re-run.

  4. Future state: Navigate to global configuration functions (admin panel, taxonomy panel, etc)

These workflows create significant challenges:

First, the multitude of new things to create fosters confusion, especially because each of these workflows is poorly documented. Second, each user type will have different levels of access and permissions for creating new things. For example, a course staff member will not have permissions to create a new course, yet the “Create a New Course” button currently takes up a significant amount of real estate.

To mitigate these challenges, Studio Home should be redesigned as a map and compass to help users navigate into the various “create a new something” pathways, rather than being the place to accomplish the creation of anything new. 

As Studio evolves, we anticipate that additional secondary purposes may emerge. For example, Studio Home will need serve as a “jumping off point” to our new Tagging Taxonomy Center. As well, it may become the new “jumping off point” we need for accessing more organization Administration functions like managing roles and permissions, configuring org-level LTI installations, etc.

Reframing Studio Home this way opens the door for us to thoughtfully consider what each of these “create something new” pathways should look like, and do the appropriate discovery work to build the required specs. It also positions us to better support new administrative features over time.

Summary of criteria to keep in mind when redesigning Studio Home:

  1. The primary function of Studio Home–a quick, intuitive way for all users to view and access everything they have permissions to view and access–should be designed to allow users with varying levels of permissions to have a consistent experience, regardless of which permissions they have. 

  2. There are many enhancements we can make to improve the “view and access” use cases, such as searching for courses/libraries, filtering for courses, etc (and many more we will create in the user story writing process.)

  3. The secondary function of Studio Home–to create something new–should be redesigned such that Studio Home is simply the jumping off point into each distinct “create something new” workflows (create a new course, create a new library, create a course re-run). 

    1. The workflows to “create something new” could be wysiwsg solutions and potentially more interactive. (Would you like to create something new? —> What would you like to create? etc etc)

 

Areas that need further product discovery:

 

  1. Collaborate with the Roles and Permissions project to define the ideal set of user roles (and subsequent permissions) we want as a platform.

  2. Product Discovery and full Product Specs for a new Administration Dashboard to manage roles and permissions.

  3. Investigate what it would take from a technical perspective to disentangle the workflow to create a new course from the Studio Home page. Just a new MFE for “create a new course”, “create a new library”, etc?

  4. Product Discovery and full Product Specs for a re-imagined Course Creation workflow.