Harvard Business Publishing

A new vision for the Case Method

With Harvard Business Publishing we tried to answer a big question: "How do we reimagine our offering for a growing, global audience of teachers and students?" Harvard originated the Case Method and produces some of the most widely used business educational materials in the world. But ed tech is changing rapidly and we needed to align on needs, the existing system, and long-term goals of the organization. A major challenge was to align stakeholders in marketing, tech, sales, and education to all pull in the same direction. Workshop time!

Experience design strategy

Synthesizing this output was a major undertaking given the scale of the business. but the upside was potentially massive: growing the user base by a factor of 10 and maintaining leadership in the market for years to come. Developing common language and alignment around priorities for such an intensive transformation became crucially important. So we documented it.

We abstracted the core platform elements and made them easily shared concepts.

Platform elements could then be mapped out in release phases and mapped to project goals.

A visualization of the educator journey. Engagement is recurring over a long period of time.

The student experience is simpler, but recurring as well.

Bringing strategy to life

But who thinks design stops at deckware? Not me. Next came the long road of system architecture, user testing, interaction, and visual design to bring the new HBP to life. Beginning with baseline documents such as inventory and workflows, we built interactive prototypes and design language that could be coded into the new HBP digital properties.

Testing

I built several desktop and mobile prototypes we could remotely test with students and teachers to check our assumptions and make tweaks to the final design.

The video below is from a live user testing session to improve the checkout flow.