Project Overview
Project OverviewThought Industries (LMS) — "The Academy", a global learning hub
Led the information architecture redesign end-to-end — analysis, design, prototyping, leadership presentation, and implementation support
~100,000+ employees, customers, partners, and students globally, across 6+ languages and 200+ courses
Graphic Designer, Developer, Subject Matter Experts
Existing LMS with no backend access, limited HTML/CSS only, single navigation structure for all user types
"How might we give 100,000+ learners across four user groups a clear, role-based way to find their content using only navigation and content permissions, with no backend changes and a broken search?"
The Problem
The Problem
The Academy served as the central learning hub for ~100,000 users across four groups — internal employees, customers, partners, and university students in over 6 languages, across 200+ courses. The platform had grown significantly. The navigation hadn't.
- Learners had no clear starting point. Without a working mental model of the platform, many couldn't find courses relevant to their role, defaulted to direct links shared by colleagues, or gave up entirely. The platform's inbuilt search was ineffective so if a learner couldn't find their content through navigation, they were stuck.
- The business impact went beyond discoverability. Training was directly tied to how quickly customers and partners could adopt and implement the product. When learners couldn't find the right courses, onboarding slowed, project timelines slipped, and confidence in the product weakened.
- There was also a structural problem underneath the surface: customers and partners had been navigating separate journeys, even when their roles overlapped significantly. The Academy needed to unify these into a single coherent experience without losing the role-specific content that each group needed.
Scope & My Role
Scope & My Role
I led the information architecture redesign end-to-end from analysing where navigation was breaking down, through to designing, prototyping, presenting to leadership, and supporting implementation.
Because the LMS couldn't be modified at a product level, everything had to be achieved within the platform's existing configuration capabilities and limited HTML/CSS access. There was no option to build new functionality. The solution had to work within what already existed.
Constraints
Constraints
The redesign had to deliver clarity for four user types at once, using only the levers the platform already exposed.
- Platform: No backend access. No role-based header customisation; the same navigation had to work for all user types simultaneously. Content permissions could be configured, but the navigation shell was fixed.
- Timeline: A few months to deliver end-to-end across teams responsible for training, customer experience, and platform operations.
- Scale: Any solution had to hold as new courses, roles, and languages were added.
Investigation
Investigation
I started where the friction was most visible — user testing recordings gathered by the Customer Experience team, showing learners attempting common tasks while their screens were recorded.
The pattern was consistent. New learners had no frame of reference for where to begin. They weren't searching for specific courses, they didn't yet know what they needed. The search bar was a dead end for them. This shaped a key design principle early: the navigation had to work without the search bar. If learners could only find content by searching, the structure had failed.
Verbatim feedback from recordings
No starting point
- "There are too many courses. I don't know where to start."
No role clarity
- "I don't know which role applies to me."
No next step
- "I finished a course, but I don't know what to do next."
I also walked the platform myself across multiple user journeys as a first-time learner, a returning learner, a customer, and a partner, mapping where each journey broke down.
Key insight
The navigation was organised around the platform's content structure, not around how learners actually thought about their own development. Learners didn't arrive thinking "I need a course from the partner track" — they arrived thinking "I'm new, where do I start?" or "I've done the basics, what's next?"
The Solution
The Solution
Based on the inputs gathered and working with the constraints, I realised that the biggest impact could come from restructuring navigation around clear, role-based pathways — improving clarity and discoverability without adding new features. Users needed a flexible system that allowed courses to appear across multiple roles while maintaining structure.
Collaborating closely with developers and team members to get accurate text and structural information for the pages, I designed a new navigation structure. I sketched early concepts using pen and paper and then created high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in Adobe XD.
These prototypes were used to align teams and communicate the intended learner experience clearly. This was signed off by the Leadership of the Academy and the Customer Experience team before final implementation. Post reviews and iterations, we were ready to build this on the website and go live.
Core design decisions
I structured the existing offerings into a five-stage learning path — Get Started, Get Trained, Get On-the-Job Experience, Get Qualified, and Get Certified — that mapped learning from beginner to advanced. This framework became the basis of the journey no matter the role. Learners' mindset shifted from "Where do I start?" to "Let's start."
To answer the questions learners arrived with before they even looked for a course, I introduced three dedicated pages: Your Journey (explains the five stages), Know your Role (maps Academy roles to real-world job titles), and About Academy (explains the full range of offerings). These pages didn't add courses — they gave learners the context to navigate confidently.
The header was carrying redundant links — multiple paths to the same destination, creating noise rather than clarity. I stripped it back to one clear entry point per page and introduced a Getting Started dropdown linking directly to the three orientation pages.
Role pages were reorganised around the five-stage journey. Previously, customers and partners navigated entirely separate journeys even when their roles overlapped. The redesign unified them — same structure, same role pages, but with content permissions surfacing only what was relevant to each user's login.
A customer and a partner visiting the same role page would see the same navigation structure but different course cards, mapped automatically to their account type. One coherent experience. No duplicated architecture.
Outcome & Impact
Outcome & Impact
At a company event following launch, customers and partners shared direct feedback that the platform was now easier to navigate and that content discovery had improved.
Reflection
Reflection
The biggest constraint shaped the best decision: because we couldn't fix the search, we had to make the navigation good enough that learners never needed it. That forced a clarity of structure that a better search engine might have let us avoid.
Designing a single structure that works for four using permissions rather than separate architectures given the constraints is something that I'm most proud of.