Prequel Classes
A web app for purchasing individual classes
Work
Strategy
Service Design
Interface Design
Timeline
Oct 2022 - Nov 2022
Role
Head of Product
Introduction
Prequel used to only deliver 6-9 week courses. However, the length of the course created barriers to entry for some students. To capture more students, we started selling on-demand classes individually.
My Role
I was the designer. I worked with two engineers and the go-to-market team.
Problems
Difficulty Tracking Payments Transactions frequently had to be investigated and linked back to students. Parents paid for the student’s programs. And sometimes, the decision making parent wasn't the one paying. There were many cases where we didn't know the paying parent’s name.
High Cost For first-time customers, the high price was a high barrier to entry. They were unfamiliar with the Prequel Brand and hadn't had enough experience with us to spend $3000 upfront.
Scheduling Conflicts Courses were 6-9 weeks long. The long schedule often conflicted with students' other commitments.
Goals
Accept payments when multiple stakeholders are involved.
Lower the level of commitment for first-time customers.
Make it easy for student to join their classes.
Program Application Process
Product Requirements
Class Discovery
We needed a page where users could see all of the classes that we offered. Once users chose their classes, we would also need them to be able to pick when they wanted to take them.
Easy Access to Purchased Classes
Once users purchased their classes, they'd need a way to access them. They'd need information about the class, the link to join via Zoom, and a way to add it to their calendars.
Class Editor with Versioning
Facilitators needed a way to edit classes and add class times. The same class would be facilitated multiple times and changes would be made along the way. As a result, we needed to give facilitators the ability to manage different versions of the same class.
Encoded & Guided Payment Links
For full-length programs, both the student and parent were part of the payment process. Sometimes there were multiple parents involved. Because of this, we didn't know what name to expect on the transaction. To solve this problem, we needed to generate guided links that would link the payment back to the student no matter who was paying.
What We Shipped
⏴⏴ The Explore Page gave users the ability to browse classes and sign up for specific time slots.
⏴ The Schedule gives users their sessions organized in sequence along with information about their sessions.
⏵ The Session Editor gives facilitators the ability to add and edit previous classes from their library to the schedule.
⏵⏵ Different versions can be saved
Reflections
This project went well on the product side. However, marketing did not drive enough demand for the actual classes. The entire strategy of Prequel was built upon the assumption that the format of our classes was easily replicable and demand would follow.
After this project, the product team ended up splitting away from the rest of the org to create a completely separate division called Prequel Competitions. We did a lot more in-depth customer discovery and product-marketing.