Activating High-Value Learning at Scale
CoachHub's Academy had strong activity ratings but only 5% monthly engagement. I designed two solutions, curated Collections coaches could assign after individual sessions and structured Learning Paths for full programs, lifting coach assignment to 28%, completion to 41%, and engagement to roughly 5.5%.
CoachHub
Product Designer
Product Manager, UX Research, Learning Experience, Engineering
2 Quarters, phased delivery
Context
CoachHub is a leading B2B2C enterprise coaching platform connecting employees with professional coaches globally. Alongside live coaching sessions, the platform offers the Academy, an on-demand library of articles, videos, exercises, and reflections designed to extend the impact of coaching into employees’ continuous development between sessions.
The Academy was central to CoachHub’s value proposition, however one year after launch, it had very low engagement, making it not utilised by the most of the people it was built for.
Challenge
The PM brought the project to the team after hearing a recurring pattern from the customer success team: HR managers had dashboard visibility into their program's learning activity, and for most clients that section was thin. Typical coaching programs run 6 to 12 months with renewals contingent on measurable development outcomes, every program ending without Academy engagement data was a renewal conversation without evidence.
The Academy was in most pitch decks, but the usage data wasn't backing it up. Activity ratings told a different story: 95% of coachees who completed an activity rated it good or amazing, but only 5% of coachees were completing at least one Academy activity per month.
The PM was clear about the urgency: Q4 was CoachHub's heaviest renewal period. Meaningful improvement was needed before it arrived.
Research
Overwhelm of choice
The Browse and search behaviour had one cause: coachees didn't know what to pick. They arrived from a session with a conversation to extend, not a topic in mind.
Broken recommendations
Recommendations pulled from incomplete data coachees didn't trust, surfacing topics that felt irrelevant to where they actually were in their coaching.
Program specific gaps
In structured programs, coaches spent session time covering foundational knowledge coachees could have learned independently, leaving less time for deeper work. There was no structured way to pre-teach those foundations before sessions.
Human guidance changed behaviour
Completion of coach-assigned content was 95%. Coaches were acting as trusted curators, assigning learning right after sessions while the context was fresh, but they lacked an easy, structured way to do it at scale.
The Academy wasn't delivering on its promise because the vast majority of coachees had no mechanism connecting them to content relevant to where they actually were in their coaching journey. Relevance required human context and the platform had no way to scale that.
From Insight to Direction
The PM and I had different reads after the research readout. The PM saw activation as the priority: reduce overwhelm and move the number before Q4. I was more focused on the relevance gap, better navigation wouldn't help coachees translate what they needed into something findable.
We evaluated three directions. Better navigation fell away quickly: coachees weren't struggling to search, they were struggling to translate a coaching conversation into something findable, and simplifying the interface wouldn't give them back the time they didn't have. A personalised "My Learning" space was a more considered option, but it would have pulled from the same broken recommendation data, a better container for broken data is still broken. We landed on coach-curated bundles: coaches building thematic content libraries, assignable to multiple coachees. It balanced both positions, scale and relevance, and the 95% completion rate on coach-assigned content was proof the mechanism already worked.
Before committing, we shared the concept with engineering for a feasibility read and with Learning Experience to sense-check the content angle. Both came back with significant concerns. The concept meant a bundle builder and a coach library for managing what coaches created. But engineering flagged the real cost: a permissions layer to keep unaudited content from surfacing publicly, and a fundamentally new data model on the legacy codebase, four or five interconnected systems in total, far beyond the Q4 timeline. Learning Experience worried about quality control: coaches optimising for personal preference over pedagogical coherence could create bundles CoachHub couldn't audit or fix. The pushback made sense, and we needed to rethink.
The Pivot
Individual Level
Coach
Session
Assign Collection
Coachee learns
Program Level
Program Setup
Learning Path
Pre-teach Foundations
Individual level solution: Collections
Collections bundle 4-7 activities around a single theme, assignable by a coach after any session, or discoverable by coachees browsing independently. They're also the building blocks of the program-level solution, where they become modules in a Learning Path.
Receiving a collection
Coaches assign Collections through the exact same flow as individual activities, by searching and filtering, so the Collection card itself needed to visually signal that it wasn't an activity. My first direction, a stacked card shape, was blocked by the fixed-dimension grid all cards shared after checking with engineers. That left a tight constraint: the signal had to live on the card image itself, without adding new elements to the card layout. After internal preference testing of several directions, a folder tab overlaid on the preview image differentiated most clearly. The distinction matters just as much for coachees browsing independently, they need to stand out among hundreds of activity cards.
Inside a Collection
The Learning Experience team had defined two Collection types: Sequential, with activities locked until the previous one is completed, and Free-choice, where linearity is not required. My direction was a distinct layout for each, for Free-choice a non-linear arrangement would have signalled "start anywhere" through the structure itself. After checking feasibility with engineering, a second layout wasn't possible within the release scope, so the design challenge became making one layout serve both. Interaction states carry the distinction: locks communicate order, their absence communicates free choice.
Prototype testing then changed that layout. On the first vertical version, coachees in Free-choice Collections kept scrolling back up to re-read the context while deciding which activity to start with, the context they needed wasn't visible at the moment of decision. That led to the split layout: context fixed on the left, activity list on the right.
Navigation & completing a Collection
To keep coachees in the learning momentum, each activity ends with a "Next activity" card handing off to the next one, no need to navigate back to the detail page between activities.
To motivate coachees, completing a Collection triggers a celebratory moment on the detail page, recognition that they finished a full collection topic.
Impact
28%
25% → 28% Coach assignment rate, organic adoption with no requirement or nudge
41%
41% Learning Paths pilot completion against a 30% pre-defined threshold
5.5%
5% → ~5.5% Overall Academy engagement lift in the first quarter after launch
The Learning Paths reinforce essential leadership behaviours like accountability, allyship, curiosity, awareness, empathy, and collaboration. These behaviours are vital for building trust within teams and driving business success, and the collections highlight these critical traits we wish to be exemplified within our teams.
Enterprise Pilot Client | Talent Development Partner
Collections and Learning Paths together moved the Academy from a platform feature coachees rarely reached to a curation system that generated measurable engagement and commercial outcomes at both individual and program level.
The coach assignment rate rose organically, with no requirement and no nudge, signalling that reducing friction can shift coach behaviour at scale. Monthly Academy engagement averaged approximately 5.5% in the first quarter after Collections launch, up from 5% in the months prior. Two things drove it: more coaches assigning through Collections, and coachees finding it easier to self-direct in browse once curated bundles were available alongside individual activities.
Learning Paths completion landed well above the 10 to 20% industry benchmark for optional corporate learning over six months. Post-pilot, coaches reported less session time spent on foundational content, leaving more room for the personalised depth work coaching is designed for.
For clients running Learning Paths, HR buyers now had program-level completion data to point to in renewal conversations, a new kind of data point sitting alongside general Academy engagement. Learning Paths became a marketed commercial feature, tied to the use cases enterprise clients were already buying, giving sales a learning story aligned to company goals rather than a generic content library.