End-to-end content design for a new product

The problem: After launching Babbel Live’s online group classes, my team was tasked with creating another product—online private classes. Starting with a weeklong design sprint, I worked across three agile teams and multiple stakeholders to help bring this new product to life. 

The solution: An MVP that prioritized the connections our learners make with teachers as the primary focus for booking private classes. We learned during our user research that this was one of the largest driving factors behind learner retention, so we focused on helping learners make that connection as quickly as possible.

How we got there:  I joined the design sprint to kick off the project and worked on the prototypes for both the learner-facing product and the teacher portal we’d created for scheduling classes with our 500+ teachers. After the design sprint, I worked alongside our product designers to refine the original designs based on user research, focusing on information architecture, content hierarchy, and copy. After the MVP was scoped and refined by the agile teams, I facilitated the creation of localization keys by our in-house translation team.

The challenges: As the only word person in the design sprint, I was the only person who brought up the issue of the new product’s name, which hadn’t yet been determined. Was it private classes? 1-on-1 lessons? Tutoring sessions? The product designers and PMs understood the importance of deciding on this name after I explained the potential ramifications.

Other stakeholders didn’t realize the impact that the name could have on the UI, especially if it didn’t align with the current headers or if it expanded too much in other languages. It was a months-long conversation with multiple stakeholders, and thankfully, in the end, my PM fought for us to keep the name we’d decided on as a team from the beginning.

The biggest win: Getting to start the content design for a new product from the very first design explorations.