What is the EdCast Marketplace?

EdCast Marketplace (formerly known as Leapest) is a global B2B e-commerce platform that supports corporate L&D teams to source all of their training needs to experts, from a single integrated learning ecosystem. This is composed of multiple web applications, each referring to a specific set of services, ranging from service procurement and training scheduling to content consumption.

Since Q4 of 2018, the Design Team has been involved in the redesign of existing applications and in the design of new ones, to ensure that, despite their differences, all make sense together in one concise product, and to improve the overall user experience - a target of criticism, at the time. As such, this page serves two main purposes:

1. To provide a general description of the redesign initiative of which the Featured Projects are part of.

2. To provide further details on what the EdCast Marketplace is, who uses it, and why.

Project Goals

The aforementioned redesign initiative is actually composed of multiple separate projects. Each one is addressed separately, which you can find more details in the other entries of this portfolio. Nevertheless, there were some overarching goals that led to and guided those projects, including:

Centralize the search, discovery, and consumption of multiple service offerings
The EdCast Marketplace aims to be a One-Stop-Shop for all Businesses' training needs. This requires the consolidation of different types of services, processes, and workflows, in one single product.

Ensure Visual and Functional Consistency
The EdCast Marketplace is composed of multiple applications and services. This implies the existence of multiple representations and workflows that must still be consistent with each other and recognizable within the same product.

Reduce dependencies (and costs) from Third-Party Applications
Despite the significant engineering effort, reducing the dependency of third-party applications vastly reduces costs in a long term and facilitates keeping a high level of visual and functional consistency.

Ensure and Improve an overall positive User Experience
By the time the Design Team became involved in these initiatives, the EdCast Marketplace had already been the target of multiple complaints by its customers. Multiple issues around navigation, access to information, and overall usability were severely harming the users' experience. This made it a key goal considering the need to redesign existing systems, but also developing new ones.

Who uses EdCast Marketplace? - User Groups

Defining personas is a very common method in UX Research and Design. However, due to the highly complex processes involved in the Training Industry, the already complex nature of the platform, and the high variety of users utilizing it, we defined, 4  main User Groups. These serve as the baseline for the creation of the required personas per product-line or project and you can see them summarized below.

Note that these groups are presented in a Ven-Diagram. This means that despite their differences, there are some common characteristics among them, such as:

• All Instructors are considered specialized service Sellers. However, when freelancing, they may need to purchase the course materials themselves, as Buyers. Similarly, when renewing their accreditations, they may need to contact specific training companies, as Learners.

• In order to create customized course programs, Sellers may also need to purchase materials from other Sellers, thus having to act as Buyers.

How do Users Work? - User Journeys

Below follows a summarized journey of all four User Groups involved with the EdCast Marketplace. For more detailed information, please refer to the individual projects listed at the end of this page, or let's discuss it in an interview.

The EdCast Marketplace Environment

As previously mentioned, the EdCast Marketplace environment is composed of multiple applications. While interconnected, the different applications serve to address the primary use cases of the various types of user groups involved. Below follows a summary of each application, together with its primary users.

Application Summary

Featured Projects