Peer Academy is a peer-based learning platform, used by corporate companies and organisations to promote and encourage professional development.
The company was struggling to articulate its direction in terms of company growth and expansion.
- Peer Academy needed greater data retention and the ability to aggregate (and gather metrics) to have a better better understanding of organisations’s teams and communities. In turn, this would serve to encourage self reflection, personal development and positively impact the host or their organisation.
- They sought a way to gather feedback on how mentors were evaluated and more information on interactions in order to continually improve and refine learning opportunities. In turn, this would allow reflection and review to facilitate self development.
- Peer Academy wanted the ability to expand learning opportunities through fostering communities, open dialogue and organisational system of their online platform, whether through a website or app. In part, this was aimed at de-formalising the process, and thus stimulating personal interactions and humanising learning opportunities.
Established in 2014, Peer Academy had facilitated innovative training and leadership sessions face-to-face, and now sought a way to enhance this process through a centralised digital platform. The team wanted an intuitive and engaging platform to encourage a wider user base. So our team set to work doing user research and co-design to establish a pathway for building the platform.
- Portable delivered a series of iterative wire and annotated wireframes, scheduled over bi-weekly, with regular feedback & client assessment, for rapid prototyping to generate output. The result was a comprehensive functional wire-frame set that demonstrated key user flows, from perspective of end users and organisations who participate and analyse this platform.
- This allowed us to redefine the MVP based on the feedback from the wireframes. The user feedback continued to allow us to develop the platform. This work sought to help us define the workflows of customers moving through the site as well as the key interactions they sought with other users.
- The design of the platform pushed user experience to the forefront, to emphasise collaboration, interaction and building and connecting networks of people. The platform had an analytics component built into it, allowing it to generate reports and statistics on levels of engagement, impact and both individual and communal experience ratings. The end result is a peer learning platform that can be utilised for corporate, public sector and government organisations.
As a result of our work we produced the following artefacts and resources:
- A new design direction for Peer Academy, with focus on integrated digital learning platform.
- Established analytical tools to help with user experience, mentors and documenting the learning process.
- The development of a content strategy allowing users have a centralised and easily accessible platform to share skills, resources and ideas.
- The redesign of the learning platform to increase training in innovation and leadership. This work is currently still in design and is expected to move into production in 2017.
Today, Portable and Peer Academy works as a partnership to present innovative coaching and training solutions for public sector and government across Australia. We focus on improving leadership frameworks, workflows and behaviours in workplaces and explaining how innovation can be used to benefit companies.
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