How I helped Circus Street learners feel at home after a platform transition, without increasing support burden
MY ROLE ON THE PROJECT
I led product design from discovery to launch.
I worked closely with Product, Sales, Customer Success, Data, and Content stakeholders across three different organizations involved in the migration.
I was responsible for:
leading UX strategy
synthesizing research and usage data
identifying opportunities to simplify the experience
aligning competing stakeholder needs
designing and prototyping the end-to-end experience
One of the biggest challenges was organizational alignment.
The Course and Lesson pages had recently been redesigned, so most stakeholders initially expected a conservative refresh rather than structural changes. However, the data showed that several highly visible sections were barely used by learners, despite being considered important internally.
Rather than continuing to optimize around existing layouts, I pushed for a more fundamental rethink focused on reducing cognitive load and helping learners quickly find the information they actually needed.
Context
At the end of 2023, QA Group began migrating learners from Circus Street to the Cloud Academy platform.
This created a significant UX challenge. Circus Street learners were used to a simpler and more intuitive experience that they genuinely liked. Cloud Academy offered richer functionality, but also introduced additional complexity and denser content structures.
A slightly dramatized summary of how early user testing with Circus Street learners went.
There was a real risk that learners would:
Improving usability wasn’t just a UX goal — it was critical to reducing migration friction and protecting retention during a high-risk transition.
We decided to improve the experience incrementally, starting with the core learning flows: Courses and Lessons.
How might we help Circus Street learners adapt quickly to a more complex platform without overwhelming them or increasing churn risk?
To better understand the problem, I combined internal stakeholder feedback across three organizations, behavioral analytics and usability testing on the existing pages.
The research consistently pointed to the same issue: learners felt overwhelmed.
Both the Course and Lesson pages had cluttered layouts, unclear hierarchies, and low-value content in prominent positions. For instance, author link only had 0.2% user engagement but was taking up a good amount of space. Useful elements like the syllabus or description were partly hidden or hard to scan, while actions like enrolling or rating were inconsistently placed.
Misleading UI elements and structural inconsistencies (highlighted with a red dot in the image) made the experience feel disjointed. Most importantly, Circus Street stakeholders and learners described the pages as very overwhelming.
Designing for flexibility across multiple stakeholder needs
As briefly mention above, one of the most politically complex areas was instructor and author information.
Different organizations had different expectations:
some content rarely included author information
Cloud Academy content often relied on recognizable cloud experts
content teams wanted flexibility to support multiple contributors in the future
At the same time, learner engagement with author-related content was extremely low.
Rather than removing the section entirely, I proposed moving it into a dedicated “Credits” tab.
This created a compromise that:
reduced visual noise for learners
preserved stakeholder needs
supported future scalability
accommodated multiple content models
The system was intentionally designed to flex between:
no author information
a single author
multiple contributors
depending on the course type.
Clarifying progress and completion
User testing also showed that learners often missed completion states entirely.
Previously:
completed lessons only displayed a small “Complete” label
certificate information appeared early as an empty progress state
progress visibility lacked clarity
To improve this, I redesigned completion patterns by:
introducing clearer completion variants
allowing users to hide completed steps
delaying certificate visibility until content was fully completed
making achievement states more visually prominent
This made progress easier to understand while reducing unnecessary distractions earlier in the learning journey.
Outcome
The migration launched without a significant increase in learner complaints or support requests, which we considered a major success given the scale of the transition.
The redesign helped reduce friction during onboarding to a more complex platform while preserving access to stakeholder-required content.
We also saw behavioral signals that learners were finding key information faster:
Scroll depth decreased by 25%, indicating learners could access important content earlier without excessive scanning
Internally, content teams also responded positively to the clearer structure and increased flexibility of the new system.
Most importantly, the migration felt less like a disruption and more like a natural evolution of the learning experience.
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