Case Study

Simplifying content management for admins

ROLE

UX, UI, Research

TOOLS

Figma

PLATFORM

Web

COMPANY

Thrive

The Auto Curation feature simplifies integrating content from various providers—such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and Go1 into the Thrive platform. This project aimed to reimagine the workflows, giving admins more control, improve content management and reduce support reliance.

VIEW PROTOTYPE

As content provider integrations expanded, platform admins struggled with managing the influx of content. It was up to the support team to intervene to bulk remove content that was irelevant to customers platforms. Rather than provide bulk remove functionality, we opted to redesign the autocuration feature. This project aimed to:

Streamline content provider workflows
Enhance admin control over content imports
Reduce the need for support interference

Background

Understanding the Users

This project had clear core users that were being impacted. With that already existing, my focus shifted towards deeply understanding how these two groups interacted with the Auto Curation feature.

Platform Admins

Admins curate and manage vast amounts of learning content, ensuring it aligns with their organization’s needs.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

As the bridge between Thrive and its clients, CSMs assist admins in fine-tuning and managing content efficiently.

Support Team

Regularly updating customer domains upon request.

Research Approach:

Conduct user interview to identify major pain points
Analyse support tickets to validate recurring themes
Map existing workflows to identify inefficiencies

Discovery

I reached out to 4 CSMs, leveraging their direct client relationships to gather meaningful insights. Through user interviews I was able to identify the core pain points they noticed customers were having.

Not Enough Curation Control

Admins couldn’t narrow their provider searches, leading to too much content being pulled in.
Unable to rename jobs pulled through.

Effort-Intensive Management

Admins had to delete unwanted content manually or raise support tickets.

Large logs made reviewing and managing content time-consuming.

Job Behaviour Limitations

Jobs kept pulling new content through unless manually deactivated afterwards.

Once a job was created, admins couldn’t edit settings like tags, filters, or audiences, forcing them to start over.

Difficult to Find the Right Content

Admins struggled to find the specific content they needed.

They didn’t know which provider had the content they were looking for.

Support Tickets

Reviewing support tickets, the average amount of content being removed from customer domains averaged between 1500-2000 for larger content providers, with instances up to 5,000. This was a real problem for two reasons:

Customer Facing

Client platforms were being flooded with content, making it harder to find the right things.

Thrive Facing

Excess time is wasted on support fixing these scenarios when it could be used elsewhere.

Define

I translated these problem areas into HMW statements. Each scenario addresses a core need identified to ensure that the updates will deliver meaningful change.

HMW help admins manage content imports efficiently to prevent overload and reduce manual clean-up?
HMW allow admins to modify curation job settings post-creation while maintaining control over imports?
HMW enhance content search and discovery so admins can quickly find relevant content and providers?

Design

With a clear understanding of our users’ needs and pain points, I transitioned from insights to design exploration. Starting with cross-functional (design, product and tech) brainstorming sessions, we explored various approaches to content filtering, job management and creation. Each idea was evaluated to ensure alignment with user needs and technical feasibility. The problems at this stage had been distilled down enough to key problem areas we wanted to explore with basic wireframes:

User Testing

I conducted a series of moderated sessions again with CSM’s, this time to get feedback on a prototyped flow, introducing a merged provider flow and also testing the addition of a one-time alongside a continuous content flow. During these sessions, they were presented with prototypes for the following