Overview: Reframing digital courseware around the student experience

Cengage was undergoing a critical transformation—from a traditional, instructor-driven publishing model to a digital-first, student-centered platform. I led the end-to-end redesign of the course access experience, aligning product strategy, UX, and engineering around a single goal: make it effortless for students to find and start their required course materials.

The Challenge: Win over students in a market where they finally had a choice

Students were no longer captive buyers. With access to rentals, secondhand markets, and alternative platforms, they were actively choosing whether or not to engage with publisher products.At the same time, internal data revealed a major operational issue:

43% of support tickets during peak semester periods were tied to course access confusion.

This wasn’t just a UX issue—it was a direct threat to revenue, retention, and brand perception.

Understanding the Problem: A fragmented experience that created friction at the moment of highest intent

Student users struggled to:

This resulted in:

Our Approach: Lean Research and Rapid iteration to understand and design for realistic student behavior and needs

We grounded the redesign in a deep understanding of student context and behavior:

To validate solutions:

Lean interviews, usability testing, and competitive teardown to identify
 where confusion and friction occurred.

The Solution: A streamlined, intuitive path from purchase to learning

We redesigned the experience around a single principle:

Get students to their course content as quickly and confidently as possible.

Key improvements included:

The result was an experience that met students where they were—busy, distracted, and outcome-focused.

The Product: What We Built and how we got there

Rapid prototypes for discovery

By turning concepts into lightweight prototypes, we were able to test with students in real-world settings, gather immediate feedback, and iterate toward solutions that actually worked.

Concepting personalization and a partner ecosystem

Our initial concepts focused on personalization, integrating both existing and prospective partner products. Through testing, we evaluated not just usability, but also which combinations created the most value—informing both product direction and partnership strategy.

Continuous testing and iteration

We continuously tested prototypes with students, using each round of feedback to quickly refine and improve the experience.

Data-driven designs

We used high-fidelity prototypes and in-person testing to evaluate competing solutions, focusing on reducing time-to-access. The results directly informed a more efficient, student-centered experience.

Delivering results at Launch

Launched in Q1 2015, the redesigned experience streamlined navigation and made course access immediate and intuitive—resulting in $10.2M in new annual revenue and a significantly improved student onboarding experience.

Impact: Reduced friction, increased access, and unlocked measurable growth

This project demonstrated how thoughtful product design can directly impact both user success and business performance—turning a high-friction experience into a scalable growth driver.