Kuro is a learning management platform that, in 2024, was doing two things at once: a full rebuild from the ground up and the addition of a customisable training marketplace that hadn't existed before.
The challenge was that the platform now needed to serve 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
Most LMS platforms treat everyone the same. Kuro's model was closer to a department store, where each organisation gets its own branded section, creators are the manufacturers supplying courses, and learners are the end customers. That framing shaped the information architecture from the start.
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.
The learner experience was redesigned for people who didn't choose to be there. Most were externally motivated by managers, so 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 creator view was the most technically interesting part of the project. The standout feature was Streams: a way for providers to distribute content across third-party LMSs via the SCORM Cloud Dispatch API, without losing ownership of what they'd made. The design goal was to make something built on a fairly involved technical integration feel straightforward for a non-technical user. That took close collaboration with engineering and a few rounds of proof-of-concept prototyping before the abstraction held.
The timeline meant some foundational research didn't happen.
Assumptions and surface-level work could have benefitted from further exploration to validate decisions and reveal unknowns:
These are the kinds of trade-offs that come with a tight time-to-market, and they'd be the first things to address in a next phase.
The platform entered soft-launch in mid-2024 with a new design system, three fully separated user experiences, and new global features including account switching and in-product messaging. The shopfront model opened a growth surface the product hadn't had before.