Kognent
As an established eLearning company since 2018, creating training solutions for clients across Australia and New Zealand, Kognent was embarking on a business venture that would create a new stream of continuous revenue for the business. In 2024, they were readying their new learning subscription product, ‘&And’, which would enable small to medium businesses to access convenient training for staff compliance and upskilling.
Brief
Kognent’s business pivot meant it required a new website that felt fresh and effectively showcase both its services and products.
The goals were:
- boost purchase rates
- generate excitement and brand awareness for &And
- increase client acquisition
- improve hiring prospects for team expansion by strengthening brand reputation
Empathise & define
Competitive usability evaluation
Competitor analysis of established eLearning websites across Australia provided insights into messaging, terminology, and structure. A key finding revealed that many companies had course catalogs with filtering that was either too extensive (causing information overload) or too limited (hindering functionality for users with varying motivations). Since course findability was a priority for the new site, a balanced approach was necessary to cater to both users who knew what they were looking for and those who did not.
User flows
User flows clarified user intentions for tasks like finding and purchasing training or applying for a job. These flows were extended to include potential user thoughts and decisions, providing insight into the user's perspective and the most convenient ways for them to achieve their goals.
Information architecture
The original website, a single scrolling page focused on client services, needed significant restructuring to emphasise courses, products, and company culture. After a content audit, a sitemap was developed to define the relationship between pages through content and functionality. This provided a clearer understanding of intended user behaviour and informed the design of navigational elements and page layouts.
Ideate & implement
Wireframes
Before the design phase, wireframing was conducted to rapidly evaluate concepts for structure, content framing, and navigation. During ideation, several design concepts were explored but not all progressed to the design phase. One considered concept involved course packages catered to different user groups and budgets. Ultimately, the decision was made to simplify course pages for the initial launch to test the broader product offering and the success of subscriptions in the eLearning market. This process helped identify potential issues early, allowing for iterative improvements and more focused design efforts.
UI design
The new website was structured around the three main business goals: Solutions (pre-made courses), Services (client-side work), and &And (learning subscriptions for easy team training).
Solutions
To showcase Kognent's comprehensive training offerings, the Solutions section aimed to help users decide between purchasing pre-made training or custom-built solutions. It also served as an introduction to learning subscriptions. Since finding a course needed to be fast and intuitive, courses were organised into five distinct, easily navigable libraries. Templated library pages highlighted learning features, featured courses, purchasing options, and testimonials, with upselling to Kognent’s partner LMS and cross-selling to other libraries. Users could browse the entire course collection, search by keyword, filter by library and availability, and sort by various criteria. Detailed course pages provided overviews, learning outcomes, author information, and course duration, aiding businesses in their buying decisions. This approach empowered customers, increasing conversions through one-time purchases, subscription sign-ups, or tailored solutions.
Services
This section aimed to showcase Kognent's digital services, highlighting their capabilities and innovations in online adult education. It featured templated pages with real-world examples, demonstrating benefits to businesses and outlining Kognent's end-to-end process, for greater transparency. Targeted at users needing specialised training unique to their team, it aimed to inspire and motivate them to engage and enter the sales funnel.
&And
This section aimed to generate excitement and brand awareness for the new learning subscription product, &And. Pre-release, it informed users about the product, highlighting its benefits and encouraging them to join the waitlist. It included audience positioning, feature inclusions, a preview of available courses, and FAQs to demonstrate the convenience of a subscription over single purchases. Post-release, the plan was to add a pricing matrix and testimonials to facilitate self-serve sign-ups and boost conversions.
Outcomes
The website launched in early 2024 aiming to enhance user experience, boost customer acquisition and increase sales conversions. The technical redevelopment prioritised leveraging Webflow’s CMS features improve internal efficiency and reduce repetitive tasks.
Since mid 2024, &And is still in the soft launch phase. The internal team has added 84 courses, with new training added monthly. During this period, Kognent acquired a range of clients for learning services, including a major global project including over 12 courses and multiple animated videos. Additionally, the website facilitated the hiring of four new staff members in various creative roles, nearly doubling the team size.
The final result is a revitalised site that showcases Kognent’s exceptional work in the learning space for both clients and training products. The complete overhaul of information architecture, detailing services and products, and showcasing team culture has made it easier for clients, customers, and industry peers to understand and engage with Kognent’s mission in the rapidly evolving eLearning industry.
Key learnings
With the imminent goals of team expansion and the launch of learning subscriptions, there was a high priority on getting the website to market quickly. This urgency left little time for discovery, measuring success, or iteration before the site went live. Given more scope within the project's constraints, here are three things I would prioritise:
Data-driven research
While strategy and design decisions were well-informed by leveraging existing knowledge and frontline sales insights, real data and feedback from customers, clients, and a broader audience could have significantly influenced and potentially improved those choices.
Customer insights
The knowledge we gathered about users was not baseless but had significant gaps, lacked depth, and had potentially bias. Instead of relying solely on third-person information from sales, a base-level approach would have been to observe sales interactions with clients or customers directly (either synchronously or asynchronously) to better understand their motivations and attitudes toward learning. Ideally, with a larger budget, a more ambitious approach would have been to run a mixed-method research project to delve deeper into user motivation, understanding, and perceptions.
Product insights
While actual learners weren’t the primary users of the Kognent website, gaining access to their insights could have significantly impacted business purchasing decisions. Understanding learners' preconceptions about eLearning—often present—could influence buyers who aim to cater to their teams. These insights would also benefit the learning products themselves, potentially enhancing conversion rates.
Data insights
If data and analytics had been available from the previous website or the LMS platform, we could have gained a better understanding of user interactions. This information could have identified pain points, message confusion, user priorities, and which features users found most valuable. Additionally, it would have informed decisions on content placement and optimised navigation paths, ultimately leading to a more intuitive and satisfying user experience.
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Concept validation
Since learning subscriptions were relatively new in the eLearning industry, having more time and access to testing tools could have allowed for earlier concept validation of both the &And brand and its product offering. This validation might have significantly impacted the website by ensuring that customers understood the offering, the benefits of a subscription model versus a traditional model, and the branding perception. Such insights could have influenced how courses were packaged, their pricing models, and the overall messaging of subscriptions. Although these factors directly affect business decisions, they could also have been valuable for understanding the market and improving product positioning on the website, enhancing its impact both before and after launch.
Navigation testing
The Kognent website structure was developed using a blend of competitor analysis to understand messaging and terminology, and pattern analysis to improve functional experiences and visual styling. While no immediate issues with navigation and structure were evident, testing and validation could have been crucial in ensuring that products and services were easily findable. With greater access to participants and an adequate budget, a card sorting study could have ensured intuitive categorisation throughout the site to make navigation easy and natural. Additionally, tree testing could have further validated usability by assigning participants tasks aligned with key business goals, such as finding learning subscriptions, budget-friendly options for customised learning, or specific courses like those on heavy vehicle load restraints. It could also address smaller navigational tasks, such as finding job application information or the year Kognent was founded. This would test not only the language of navigational items but also their placement and structure, ensuring information discoverability.