Bringing SkillsWave's upskilling story to life
A skills-focused onboarding experience that opened doors for SkillsWave to compete in a skills-dominated market.
My Role: Senior Product Designer (lead on Guide)
1 Designer, 1 Design Manager, 6 Developers, 1 Product Manager
Jan. 2024-Sept. 2024
A video going through SkillsWave Guide. I designed the full onboarding workflow and my colleague designed the recommendations page.
SkillsWave Guide
SkillsWave helps companies manage their professional development programs. Employees can discover accredited, corporate-focused learning and employers can easily approvals, completion, investment, and outcomes. SkillsWave Guide is an onboarding workflow within SkillsWave that helps employees identify the skills they want to build and receive tailored learning recommendations based on those interests.
Product Direction: "We need to do something more with skills"
In early 2024, SkillsWave had been in market for about a year and a half. We had the core product in place along with early customers and a growing library of courses and programs. As the product matured, two challenges became clearer: our growing catalog was getting harder to search, and we needed a stronger point of differentiation in a market where many competitors offered similar workflows.
The only mention of skills we had in the product at the time was skill tags on courses and programs. This information could be filtered on, but that was it.
At the same time, the team was exploring Lightcast, a skills dataset based on job posting demand. This created an opportunity to improve our existing course skill tags and make skills a more meaningful part of the product experience.
After exploring a few options, we aligned on a skill-focused onboarding flow that would lead into a recommendations page, allowing us to gather employee interests early and deliver more personalized recommendations. The onboarding flow needed to be simple, quick to fill out, personalized, and "feel smart" by incorporating Lightcast and possibly some AI elements. I led the design of the onboarding flow, while my teammate focused on the recommendations page.
My Process
Align: Translating a loose direction into a concrete product workflow
As I began designing the onboarding experience, three things became clear. First, I needed to represent skills in a way that felt intuitive to users. Second, I needed to understand how Lightcast structured skills and careers so I could design a workflow that made sense for both people and the system behind it.
My Miro board of research, including context gathering and understanding, competitor analysis and user journeys, understanding Lightcast and skills, and testing ideas. Specific details cannot be shared due to confidentiality.
Understanding how users think about skills: Skills were still a relatively new product concept in our space, but they were not new to users in real life. I wanted to understand how people naturally thought about skills, then shape the product around that mental model. To do this, I pulled together a large knowledge board with insights from past D2L research, competitor flows, examples of how skills were represented in the market, draft user journeys, and early explorations of how skills and careers might work together. Through this I learned a few key things:
Users see skills as relatively flat — at most there are "groups of skills that are similar", but they don't go levels deep like learning outcomes or an org chart.
Many competitors put the responsibility on the user to pick the skills that match them from a large library of skills. This was intuitive, but took some work to fill out.
Career goals and "skills a user is interested in learning" are different. Career goals are a bigger commitment and usually not in the same conversation as just "learning a new skill.
My Miro board of examples that explain the differences between skills, Lightcast subcategories, and careers. I used Venn Diagrams to explain whenever groups of skills overlapped.
Understanding Lightcast (our skills database): Lightcast uses job posting data to identify and rank skills, and it provides structured relationships between skills, sub-categories, and careers. That structure was useful, but it also created tension. In the data model, careers and skill groupings were both collections of related skills. For users, though, “skills you’re interested in” and “career goals” felt meaningfully different, with career goals carrying more weight. That became an important design consideration as I shaped the onboarding flow.
This stage was highly iterative. Once I learned something about the space, I would explore ways it could show up in onboarding, bring those ideas back to my team, uncover new questions, and then loop back into research again.
At the end of this phase, the learnings I carried forward were:
Skills needed to be flat and easier to scan, and ideally the work to select skills needed to be easy
Career goals needed to be treated as a distinct concept from "skills a user is interested in learning"
The workflow needed to balance what made sense to users with the structure of the underlying Lightcast data.
Explorations for SkillsWave Guide in low-mid-fidelity. I tested many ideas for having skills and careers on the same page and separate pages.
Make: Designing a simple, smart onboarding flow
After taking in what I learned from my explorations, the next big question was: How do I make this onboarding feel simple and smart?
I started by removing the typical onboarding step of asking users to fill out a bunch of personal information. Instead, we pulled that in through SSO, Lightcast, and a bit of AI. The first page welcomes users by name and matches their role to a Lightcast role right away. This turned the experience from “fill in these form fields” into “quickly confirm that this information looks right.”
I also wanted the first screen to show value immediately, so as soon as the page loads, the “skill popper” begins revealing skills related to the pre-selected role. This helped the experience feel more intelligent and gave users something useful right away before having to do any work.
The second and third steps focus on two distinct concepts: skills a user wants to build and career goals.
Sharpen your skills: This page groups skills using Lightcast’s sub-categories and presents them as scannable boxes, allowing users to select broader areas of focus with one click instead of picking through individual skills.
Careers: While careers are also powered by related skills on the back end, they are presented differently because they carry a different meaning for users. The focus is on adjacent career paths, with skill overlap, transferable skills, and growth opportunities helping users understand how close they already are to a new role.
The Figma Amplitude event specifications. I used these boxes to indicate what I wanted to track throughout the SkillsWave Guide workflow.
Throughout this process, we also tested our concepts and made plans to monitor post release through our quantitative analytics platform.
This onboarding ended with the recommended page designed by my colleague. After onboarding was complete, the platform would take all the selected skills a user was interested in as well as their role skills and generate a recommendations page full of courses that were tagged with those skills.
Monitor: SkillsWave has a skills story, spurs on improved search and skill tagging
The final SkillsWave marketing page for SkillsWave Guide. You can visit this page live here.
