Overview
Ziplines (formerly GreenFig) is an exciting e-learning startup with one mission—to help individuals gain the digital skills and real-world experience they need to thrive in careers they love. By partnering with universities to deliver practical, industry-focused courses in high-growth career areas such as digital marketing, business analytics, sales operations, and sales development, the company gives workers the skills and credentials to compete in the booming "codeless" or tech-enabled jobs market.
When the Ziplines leadership team first reached out to us, the company was just beginning work to raise seed funding. Ziplines needed help designing an attractive, intuitive, and effective learning management system (LMS) platform that would appeal to investors and future users. We couldn’t wait to get started.
Rather than jumping straight into design, we took our time to understand the product’s key stakeholders and audiences (such as school administrators and industry professionals), and its end users (students). Where we saw opportunities for improvement, we challenged the leadership team’s initial assumptions about how the platform should operate.
From the beginning, Ziplines wanted to give students something more than a digital textbook. Believing that learning with real-world applications would always win out over abstract theories and concepts, the leadership team wanted to create an LMS that would set students up for success right away. Together, we developed an approach that emphasizes incremental learning and practical tools.
The final designs incorporated a number of unique features to help students choose courses that would best fit their particular needs and career goals. Features such as “Talk to an Expert,” “Industry Analysis,” and “Demand and Supply” would help give students the additional information they needed to estimate their return on investment for a particular course, and determine whether it was right for them.
Designs in hand, Ziplines set off to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) version of its LMS platform. Today, we continue to work with Ziplines, helping the company iterate on its existing workflows to continuously improve scalability.
