One product. Three completely separate user types.
No playbook for the marketplace model it was becoming.
Kuro is a learning management platform rebuilding itself from the ground up, adding a customisable training marketplace on top of a full redesign.
The challenge wasn't the redesign, it was that the platform now served three user groups with fundamentally different goals: learners consuming training, organisations administering it, and content providers creating and distributing it.
The design had to accommodate the user experiences of three distinct groups: learners, organisations, and content providers. Each group had unique requirements which meant tailoring the interface and features to their specific needs.
The main goals of the platform redesign were:
A department store, not a supermarket
The structural problem was that most LMS platforms treat everyone the same. Kuro's new model was closer to a department store: each organisation gets its own branded floor, while providers are the manufacturers supplying stock, and learners are the shoppers. That framing became the IA foundation.
Stakeholder interviews, persona workshops, and competitive analysis of both LMS platforms and ecommerce products grounded the information architecture across all three user tiers. User flows mapped the distinct journeys: a learner completing assigned training, a manager enrolling a team, a provider pushing content to multiple third-party platforms.
Three views built around different mental models
The learner experience was redesigned for people who didn't choose to be there. External motivation from managers meant the priority was speed to task: a central dashboard surfacing assigned and in-progress training, with self-enrolment kept secondary.
The organisation view required the deepest structural rethink. Organisations were no longer creating content — they were customising it and managing the people learning it. The IA shifted accordingly, from course management to learner visibility and portal customisation.
The provider view was net-new. Its standout design challenge was Streams: a feature enabling providers to distribute content across third-party LMSs via the SCORM Cloud Dispatch API, without surrendering ownership. The technical complexity was real, but the design goal was the opposite: making Streams feel simple enough for a non-technical customer success manager to configure. That required close collaboration with engineering and iterative proof-of-concept prototyping to make the abstraction hold.
The platform entered soft-launch in mid-2024 with a new design system, three fully separated user experiences, global features like account switching and in-product messaging, and a new growth surface via the shopfront model.
Unfortunately due to timeline constraints, stakeholder pressure accelerated hi-fi work before discovery was complete, and user research stayed internal.
The timeline compressed some of the work that would have strengthened the foundation: