Kevin Zazzali
Kevin Zazzali
PowerForward is an interactive online-leadership course devised around Coach K’s teachings.
PowerForward is an interactive online-leadership course devised around Coach K’s teachings. It involves video interviews with business leaders from all walks of life, and asks users to face down the same decisions these leaders faced in their careers.
Mike “Coach K“ Krzyzewski is the current head coach of the Duke men’s basketball program He has led them to 5 national titles. He is the winningest men’s college basketball coach of all time. He also coached the USA Men’s team to 6 gold medals.
I redesigned the B2B program into a product suited for individuals. The B2C product now follows a course-like layout with 5 lessons.
Initially, the product was intended for use by teams of 10 or more. Corporations would use the program to foster leadership and build teams. Users of the course would watch and react to compelling interviews of business leaders overcoming adversity.
Our CEO saw an opportunity in focusing on individuals to better sell the product. How could we build an individual program on the back of a team-based product? Let’s meet the team I was part of that made this happen.
We were all based in Manhattan, except for Philip, who worked remotely from Los Angeles.
Coach K was based in North Carolina, and CAA was based in Los Angeles. This presented some logistical challenges in terms of decision-making and sign-off.
Philip joined us for an in-person brainstorming session in New York, where we spent hours white-boarding and discussing solutions.
We found it made sense to call the B2B program Version 1.0. We thought of the B2C product as Version 1.5. Since we had to be lean, we allocated a lot of longer-term goals, features and ideas to Version 2.0.
Initially, in Version 1.0, we referred to each part of our program as an “experience,” but in Version 1.5 we would be treating the program as a course. We had to define and label an “experience’s” component parts.
This process allowed us to make sense of the program and use a common language for development and design.
I spoke to various members of Salesforce, who were piloting the B2B program. Any usable feedback could be applied to the current or upgraded product.
In our conversations, I discovered that users were anonymously completing experiences by bypassing the login screen. I did a video screen share (Salesforce is based in Seattle) and was able record the error as Jennifer replicated it on her system. Philip promptly squashed this bug on the backend.
Another piece of information that benefitted Version 1.0 directly was this comment from Kelly. The PowerForward experience doesn’t tackle controversial subjects, so it was surprising to learn that users were feeling stress and even fear of judgment from their peers. Because of this, we engaged in some feature prioritization.
Kelly was referring specifically to Reflection and Team Discussion. While still crucial to Version 1.0, we applied the feedback I received.
Philip turned off the Reflection and Team Discussion pages for Version 1.5. We intended to group individuals who purchased the B2C program into cohorts. We decided to pursue other preexisting off-platform venues for creating a community for our individual users, such as a dedicated Slack channel, or a Facebook group.
I spoke with Chrissie at length about her goals for the redesign. Simplicity was paramount.
Since the clock was ticking, I spoke with Philip about ways to improve our process of handing-off deliverables.
Prior to the upgrade of the product, Philip and I spent two months redesigning the marketing website for PowerForward. During this process, we had worked together to create a style guide.
Earlier in the process, we had worked out the best grid systems for a responsive site. I rely on my ability to take good notes, and in this case, sketching out what development entailed allowed this grid system to be second nature.
This graphic represented my guidelines for placing content in my wires. It’s the culmination of discussion, note-taking and decision-making. While not always possible, in this case, sharing a refined graphic to Chrissie and Philip provided an artifact to refer back to if necessary.
You can see the grid in action overlaid on the Course screen for Version 1.5.
Our initial Course for Version 1.5 was called “The Fist” and it included fives Lessons.
This is where I made the biggest impact in terms of the user interface for Version 1.5. I included detailed annotations so that the handoff of deliverables would be smooth.
The Lesson cards were crucial to the Course page. Since Version 1.0 was hard-coded, new design elements had to adhere to existing rules and mechanisms. A seemingly simple change in structuring information, like adding titles and subtitles for Version 1.5, correlated to work on Philip’s part.