Sanar, Student Platform Squad

Lead Product Designer: Daniela Falcone

Sanar offers SaaS products in a B2C & B2B2C model that focuses on supporting the education of medical students through content products such as classes, handouts, and even post-graduate courses.

This project encapsulates the essence of a Lead Product Designer’s role—crafting innovative, user-centric solutions that drive tangible business results.

This transformative journey not only harnesses the power of personalization but also sets the stage for sustainable growth and user satisfaction.

In the ever-evolving landscape of online platforms, delivering a personalized and engaging experience is paramount. Recognizing the potential of tailored content, we embarked on a transformative journey to amplify SanarFlix’s value proposition.

A glaring warning came from usage analytics: the content on the Home page simply isn’t hitting the mark in terms of relevance for users. The analysis revealed users were overwhelmingly engaging with just two elements of the page, the search bar (37%) and the courses menu (19%), leaving other features and contents neglected at less than 5%.

Additionally, the Home page had an outdated and inconsistent interface with our platform’s recent upgrades. It’s time for a change, and we’re aiming for nothing less than a premium aesthetic.

This project was a chaotic adventure requiring agility, innovation, and adaptability to define success and goals for SanarFlix’s Home page. It was a journey filled with challenges, unexpected twists, and, ultimately, a triumphant transformation.

With a tight deadline of just one quarter, I embarked on a whirlwind design journey. I had to navigate a landscape filled with anxious C-level executives, interfering stakeholders, and a rapid cycle of refinements. Not to mention the ever-present technical constraints and the simultaneous design and development of features.

With limited direct user involvement due to our tight timeline, I took an unconventional approach during the discovery phase. I enlisted the collaboration of medical students from our content team, ensuring diversity across various dimensions, including medical school phases, gender, class, race, and cognitive abilities. Though sometimes biased, their insights proved to be a compass in navigating the complex terrain.

To set the project’s premises, I orchestrated a series of collaborative workshops with key stakeholders and users, unveiling the project’s success criteria:

I collaborated with our design chapter to craft a design concept to be critiqued by students and stakeholders, balance users’ and business needs, and enable me to build a feasible solution that ensured our project stayed on track and met its goals for the quarter.

We’ve adopted a modular approach that empowers SanarFlix to grow seamlessly as the user base expands. This scalability ensures that every user, whether a novice or an expert, finds their place within the platform’s ecosystem. Moreover, our visual revamp was inspired by well-established streaming patterns while preserving brand consistency and personality.

The solution involves meticulously shaping user interactions, focusing on the fundamental Job To Be Done, and aligning with industry best practices. Our revamped Home page is designed to ensure a seamless cognitive experience.

My role was to craft intuitive, user-centric solutions that elevate the user experience and drive meaningful engagement.

Our strategic interventions were designed to drive measurable and impactful results:

Increase in Content Findability: By fine-tuning content delivery, we anticipate a significant rise in user access to Question-Driven Learning practice and video content, meeting users where they are in their learning journey.

Enhanced Engagement: Beyond search, we aim to boost user engagement with the various platform contents and features, immersing users in a rich and dynamic learning environment and increasing the average session duration.

Reduced Passive Churn: Our tailored experience ensures users remain actively engaged and alert about subscription renewal, thereby reducing passive churn and boosting user retention.

User Qualification and Growth: By aligning content with user needs and behavior, we anticipate qualifying the user base by their input of relevant data to address even more specific demands, ultimately leading to continued growth in user engagement (MAU, WAU, DAU).

To meet sales deadlines and ensure a sustainable pace, we divided the delivery into 2 steps, using the visual disruption, value added to users, implementation efforts, and technical dependencies as prioritization constraints.

→ Each phase was estimated to take 6 weeks.

Phase 1 delivers the first fold, menu (accounting internal pages’ grid update), and footer.

Phase 2 updates the body content with dynamic modules.

The heart of our solution is personalization. No more hunting content around; it’s right there when you need it.

As the first effort to achieve a custom experience, the journey-focused area serves content aligned with user-defined goals and preferences. The next steps will enable it to also respond dynamically to user behavior.

We used the menu to affirm that SanarFlix is now Sanar’s Platform. Transitioning from a top to a sidebar menu enables scalability while granting Functional Access, Organization, Personalization, Interactivity, and Integration.

The design also accounted for grid adjustments for both the Home and internal pages to support this change.

We leveraged Sanar’s professors’ authority, emojis, and motivational messages based on user behavior to foster connection and trust.