Context

I joined Udacity in December 2011 pre-seed funding. I was the third employee and when I joined there were about 160,000 people signed up to take a 16-week class about AI from our founder, Sebastian Thrun. He had taught the class many times in person at Stanford, but teaching it online and asynchronously presented many challenges. This class was the proof of concept he needed to start one of the very first Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC). 

How We Did it

In my first 8 weeks we worked in Sebastian’s guest house and grew our team to 6. Our small team gave the company the name Udacity, developed a unique format for our online classes, created learning materials for 2 classes, and designed and built an MVP platform, all in time to launch in early February.  

During the time I was at Udacity, I worked as an embedded designer collaborating closely with the engineering team as well as the course development team. We continued to work at this breakneck speed increasing course offerings to 15. I grew the UX team to 3 and the overall company grew to around 35. 

The main focuses of the product team were

1. The website as a tool for growth and student acquisition
2. The learning platform that prioritized student experience and retention

Home Page 

We were very experimental with the website and continuously iterated with a focus on student acquisition. My primary collaborators were a content designer and a front-end developer.

Learning platform 

Ahead of our initial launch, I paired with one developer to put out an MVP that allowed us to manually upload course lectures and notes. We prioritized user experience over visual polish which helped us move quickly as we added more functionality to the learning platform. We quickly added functionality to practice and submit code in an embedded code environment and take multiple-choice quizzes.

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Course Progress

I was also working closely with an engineer whose focus was on engagement. We conducted user research and talked to student advisors. Our biggest learning is that students really wanted a way to gauge their progress and performance. I worked with my engineering pair to design solutions based on what data we could surface to users. We conducted a user study to test our ideas using low-fidelity mockups. We quickly launched a feature to show students which modules and assignments they have completed.