Challenge
Creating Meaningful Learning: L&D teams often know the broad skill areas their employees need to develop, but they struggle to break those down and find the right content to create concise and effective learning paths.
Opportunity
Leveraging AI, L&D teams can define granular skill needs and align relevant content to skills enhancing the curation process that leads to more effective learning paths.
Current solution
The current learning path creation process is manual, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. Even with support from Udemy’s Professional Services team, identifying skill needs and aligning content takes weeks, often resulting in long, inefficient learning path.
Manual creation of learning paths
Product Discovery
We validated the problem through three sources. We interviewed the internal professional services teams — the Udemy people who were manually building learning paths for enterprise customers every day. We talked directly to 8 L&D admins across SMB and enterprise segments. And we also looked at market research on how other companies were solving the same problem.
Design Discovery
As the problem became clearer, I used exploratory design to pressure-test possible directions, better understand technical constraints, and clarify what the system could realistically support.
The ideal version was a conversational UI where admins could describe what they needed and see a full skill tree and learning path generated in real time, but synchronous generation was technically infeasible within the infrastructure. The second direction broke the experience into steps, using a conversational flow to define skills, build the tree, and then generate the path, but a conversational UI was out of scope for the first release. The third direction adapted the existing learning path UI to show skill-tree mapping inline, helping admins see how skills connected to content within a familiar interface, but that surface was not available for this project.
Real-time generation
Step-based approach using a chatbot
Learning path UI change
Concept Testing
Before going further I put a concept design together and tested it with admins in a figma prototype. The concept was a three-step flow you see here. Input skill needs, build a skill tree, create the path.
Concept testing design
In Progress 🚧
check back soon again...