overview
Lightful Academy was the core learning experience for nonprofits and professionals, combining self-paced learning, live workshops, 1:1 coaching and practical digital tools.
It was central to Lightful's value proposition. But the experience had grown around the constraints of a third-party LMS rather than around the way people actually learned. The platform was fragmented, desktop-oriented, difficult to evolve and offered little room for experimentation. We needed to rethink how Lightful delivered learning.
product problem
The original constraint wasn't just UX. it was product ownership.
Academy had been built on top of Docebo. That gave the organisation a functioning learning platform, but it also created structural constraints:
Fragmented information architecture
Desktop-first foundations
Limited flexibility for iteration
Dependence on a third-party platform
No meaningful path for AI-native learning experiences
Improving the interface without addressing those constraints would have made the existing system cleaner, but not fundamentally better.
product decision
we made two strategic decisions.
Mobile-first meant mobile-first.
Almost 90% of learners were using Academy on mobile. We stopped treating mobile as a smaller version of the desktop product. The information hierarchy, navigation and learning journeys would be designed around the smallest and most frequently used context first.We needed to own the experience.
Instead of continuing to optimise around the limitations of Docebo, we explored a first-party learning platform that Lightful could evolve itself. That decision wasn't only about design quality. Ownership would give the team greater control over product iteration, experimentation, learning journeys, content models, future AI experiences
The existing project documents these two decisions explicitly: designing mobile as the primary experience and moving away from adapting the third-party LMS.
product idea
From content library to learning journey.
One of the deeper problems wasn't the amount of content. it was orientation. users needed to understand: Where am I? What should I do next? What is relevant to me? How do live sessions, courses and coaching connect?
We reorganised the experience around five clearer areas:
Home
Focus and guidance.My Learning
A personal view of progress and next steps.Courses
Structured self-paced learning.Live & Coaching
Human support integrated into the learning journey.Resources
Useful material without disrupting progression.
The redesign reduced cognitive overhead.
Testing gave us a strong qualitative signal. Learners described the new experience as: “clearer” and “less stressful". Mobile also began to feel like the intended product rather than a compromised version of desktop. That mattered because the goal wasn't simply usability. A learning product asks people to invest attention over time. Every unnecessary decision made outside the learning itself competes with that attention.
Learning should spend cognitive effort on learning. Not on figuring out the product.
That became one of the principles behind the redesign. The system should make progression, orientation and next actions obvious enough that the learner's attention remained on the content itself.
AI shouldn't feel like another tool. It should feel like part of the learning experience.
We explored AI as a learning companion rather than a generic chatbot. Early concepts included:
Summarise
Turn lessons and live sessions into concise takeaways.Explain
Offer contextual support while someone is learning.Reflect
Help learners process what they had just completed.Guide
Recommend what to explore next based on progress.
product opportunity
From static curriculum to adaptive support.
Traditional learning platforms largely say: Here is the content.
The product opportunity was to begin saying: Here is what matters to you right now.
That shifts Academy from being only a content delivery system toward becoming a system capable of helping learners navigate knowledge. And importantly, AI wasn't replacing coaches.
It could support the moments between structured learning and human coaching.
Live sessions and 1:1 coaching remained some of Lightful's most valuable learning experiences. The role of AI wasn't to remove that human layer. It was to make lower-intensity support more available between those moments.
the impact.
For the first time, Lightful could deliver expertise without requiring direct human involvement.
+28%
increase in learning path completion Clearer navigation, stronger progress visibility and more obvious next steps helped learners move through courses with less friction.
+75%
increase in returning learners. A more mobile-first, progress-oriented experience encouraged learners to return and continue their learning journey over time.
-35%
time spent finding the next learning activity
The new information architecture reduced the effort required to understand where to go next across courses, live sessions, coaching and resources.
What I learned
Behaviour can invalidate the brief.
We could have approached the work as a conventional LMS redesign. Discovering that almost 90% of usage came from mobile showed that the more important problem was the product strategy underneath it.Sometimes the most important UX decision is architectural.
Changing navigation helped. Choosing to own the platform changed what the organisation could build next.Learning products should optimise for orientation, not consumption.
More content doesn't create more value if learners don't know where to begin, why something matters or what they should do afterwards.AI is more useful when it understands the moment.
A generic assistant would have added another interface. Contextual support around learning, reflection and progression had the potential to become part of the experience itself.
