TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above)
I loved the idea of MOOCs when they came out. 👩🏫
‘Massive open online courses’ promised to disrupt higher education. By opening official courses to anyone who wanted to participate, MOOCs would democratize access to learning. And prices at Harvard, Stanford, and other universities would go down. Woot!!! 🥳 Big win.
Except that didn’t happen—at least not exactly. Today, you can’t go to Yale for $99 a semester or graduate MIT for free. But what MOOCs lacked in disruptive power, they made up for in reaching big audiences of people looking to learn new skills or be more competitive in their careers.
Crucially, HR departments jumped on MOOCs as a way to train, upskill, and reskill employees.
This brings me to Udemy, the subject of today’s teardown. They’ve been around for 13 years—long enough to become a leading online course provider offering over 210,000 consumer courses as well as Udemy Business, their enterprise product for employee learning.
But does their UX/UI and app design set them—and learners—up for success? Or should they, like a review on their Google Play download page suggests, ‘hire one of [their] own instructors and make the navigation of [their] platform less obnoxious’? 😲😱🤔
Today, we’ll find out. We’ll look at how Udemy are positioning themselves on their home page. We’ll check out their pricing and onboarding flow.
And we’ll also take a peek at Udemy Business and how they’re trying to power HR teams. 💼🫂
3 things I cover in this teardown:
💡’What were they thinking???’ 🧐 A big missed opportunity on their homepage
💡What they should be doing more of to increase user confidence (& conversions)
💡The most effective time to get people to buy
➕ Bonus: Small ways to improve a sales call script
☝️This is a longer teardown because it contains a bonus section at the end where we get on a real sales call with a Udemy rep and see their B2B sales strategy in action. Stick around—you’ll learn something 😉
Next week: Udemy Teardown Part 2: Completing a course 🎓
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Massively Missed Onboarding Opportunity? Udemy Teardown