The problem
Instructors signed up in large numbers but most never finished building their first course. The builder buried basic actions like "publish" behind a stack of unrelated settings, error messages spoke in database terms, and there was no way to preview a course as a student would see it.
What we did
- Discovery. Sat in on real onboarding sessions and mapped every step an instructor took from signup to a published course, tagging exactly where people gave up.
- Redesign. Rebuilt the builder around a single linear flow — content, pricing, publish — with a live student-view preview at every step, and rewrote error states in plain language.
- Design system. Delivered the new flow as a component library in Storybook so engineering could ship it without re-deriving spacing and states from scratch.
The outcome
Drop-off during course creation fell by more than half, and the median time from signup to a published first course dropped from multiple days to under an hour. Support tickets asking how to publish all but disappeared.