The 2024 State of User Research Report found that almost half (45%) of researchers are looking to a coach or mentor for professional development. As we learned in interviews with Michele Ronsen and Stacy Beran about the most essential skills for UX researchers, continuous learning, training, and development is key to staying ahead in the industry.
This appetite for professional development is just one reason the User Interviews team recently launched the User Interviews Academy, a product education resource offering courses, certifications, and tailored learning paths to empower researchers to make the most of User Interviews.
Our first three courses are geared toward Research Operations professionals and new users of our panel management platform Research Hub, covering the basics of onboarding, tips for team coordination and training, and best practices for building and maintaining a research panel with User Interviews—and we’ve got several new, exciting courses planned for 2025! 🚀
In the spirit of building in public—and to offer some guidance and insight for other teams looking to implement a product academy for their customers—here’s a look at:
- Why we built the Academy
- How we approached its creation
- What we learned along the way
- What’s in store for the future
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💥 The catalyst: Why we built the User Interviews Product Academy
When I switched to the Product Marketing team from the Content Marketing team back in October 2023, the Academy was a loosely-defined vision. The precedent for SaaS product academies had already been set by companies like HubSpot, Slack, and Appcues, and we knew that investing in customer education could help us improve key success metrics like user onboarding, product adoption, and retention at scale.
In exploratory interviews with customers and prospects, we noticed two key trends that served as the inspiration for developing a new product education resource:
- Opportunities to enhance product onboarding and activation: Customer research revealed that many of our users, especially those adopting our Hub platform, felt there was an opportunity to learn the platform more quickly and effectively. They expressed a desire for more comprehensive and engaging training materials to help them unlock the full potential of our tools and maximize their value.
- An appetite for professional development in research and recruitment: Our customers didn’t just want technical guidance on how to use our platform—they also wanted to learn best practices that would advance their careers, boost their confidence, and improve the quality of their research.
We knew there was an opportunity to help our customers do more, better, faster research with User Interviews. Our vision was to offer multi-media, self-paced courses that cover a blend of best practices and tool-specific learning.
🛠️ The work: Our approach to building the UI Academy
From committing to the idea to finally going live, building the Academy was about a six-month process that required thoughtful planning and collaboration across our marketing, ops, and customer success teams. Here’s how we brought it to life.
1. Find examples and inspiration
Product academies aren’t new, so we started by researching examples from similar companies to help us refine our vision. We looked at branding, course curriculums, website structures, and more to gather ideas and explore what a minimal viable product (MVP) for our Academy would look like.
This exploration helped shape our vision for a unique and impactful learning experience tailored to our users.
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Researching examples from other companies helps refine your vision, identify best practices, and determine the MVP for your academy. Conduct a competitive analysis to gather inspiration, and use tools like Miro or similar platforms to organize your findings visually.
What you should not do: Get distracted (or discouraged) by every bell and whistle you find in other companies’ product academies. What works for their org is not necessarily going to work for you, so be discerning about which features are actually worth investing in and which features are just nice-to-haves.
2. Define our audience, positioning, and goals
Knowing that we couldn’t feasibly launch with a full course library tailored to each of our customer personas and ICPs, we needed to narrow our focus (while keeping an eye toward a broader audience in the future).
Based on customer research and product adoption goals, we decided to prioritize an audience of newly-onboarded admins of Research Hub—the folks in charge of managing their team’s User Interviews account, configuring the basic settings, and training their team to use UI.
Although this left us with a relatively narrow audience for launch, we felt that we could make the biggest initial impact on product activation, usage, and satisfaction by starting with courses to streamline the onboarding process and provide admins with the resources they need to effectively enable their teams.
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Use customer insights and company goals to prioritize a limited audience for launch. This will allow you to create high-impact resources tailored to user needs while giving you wiggle room to iterate and scale in the future.
What you should not do: Forget about the rest of your customer base. Although we advocate for a “start small” approach, it’s also helpful to take a step back and consider the full spectrum of segments, audiences, and ICPs you’ll want to expand into in the future. This way, you can build your academy to make room for expansion and preempt any “growing pains” you might experience later on.
3. Align with the Customer Success team (and a whole bunch of other folks)
Creating the Academy was a big lift across various teams, including:
- Marketing: Planned the Content planning, course design, and leading pre-launch promotions to generate interest.
- Customer Success (CS): Reviewing materials, hosting Academy videos, encouraging users to participate, and providing insight from customer conversations that informed the Academy’s direction.
- Design: Designing and developing a rich, user-friendly website to host Academy content.
Since the Academy is a customer resource designed to support product activation goals, it was especially important that we aligned with the CS team on how we would bring the Academy to life. Over several brainstorming sessions, we worked together to define our goals, audience, content, and approach.
I’m particularly grateful to UI’s Lead Web Designer Holly Holden, our contracted Web Developer Maddie Chili, UI’s Customer Success Specialist and Academy video instructor Kaylynn Kilmer, and Product Marketing Director Zoe Nagara for their contributions.
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Align with cross-functional teams (CS, marketing, design, etc.) to ensure that the academy addresses all key user needs and contributes to core business objectives. This not only ensures strategic harmony, but also socializes the project to the rest of the team, building the foundation for effective collaboration and enthusiastic engagement later on.
What you should not do: Wait. Schedule brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders as early on as possible to avoid delays and make sure everyone has a voice in influencing the academy’s direction. Once you start building the course content and academy site, it’ll be much more difficult (and frustrating) to revise your approach, so it’s best to get everyone on the same page before the real work begins.
4. Decide whether to build or buy
One of the biggest decisions we had to make was whether to build the Academy ourselves or invest in a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Skilljar, Trainn, or Absorb LMS.
While LMS tools are built for purpose, save time on creating and managing courses, and often have key features that can be tricky to achieve with an internal website build (e.g. automated content delivery, personalization and gamification, support for multiple languages, etc.), we ultimately chose to start small with an in-house solution built by a contractor. This approach would give us more control over the final product and allow us to test the concept without overcommitting resources before scaling.
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Test before you invest. Make a list of need-to-haves and nice-to-haves and evaluate whether your needs justify the investment in a full-featured LMS or if a simpler in-house solution will suffice. Consider scalability, basic requirements, and budget constraints when making your decision. This way, you can test the concept with minimal risk before committing to a more expensive solution.
What you should not do: Build in-house if you lack the necessary expertise. The UI team decided that splitting the build between our in-house team and an external contractor was the best course of action for us, but that doesn't mean our approach will work for everyone. Carefully evaluate the pros and cons of different solutions before settling on one for your team.
5. Design and create the course curriculum
Along with developing the Academy website, creating the content made up a bulk of the work.
Informed by customer insights from our internal UX research and CS teams, I planned a high-level course curriculum that spanned roles, products, user needs, and lifecycle stages.
User Interviews already offers several streams of content for our customers—from our downloadable Panel Reports to the technical documentation in our Help Center—so we reduced the workload by adapting existing content wherever possible. We wanted to offer various content formats to support different learning styles, so we made sure to include written content, videos, images, and product screenshots for each lesson.
UI’s Enterprise Customer Success Manager Jen Pecoraro provided invaluable feedback and insight on the first few Academy courses. Senior Operations Associate Justin Takeuchi also contributed some technical support content for the Academy, including the CSS/HTML Cheat Sheet for the Branding & Templates lesson.
Lastly, we created short quizzes for each course to help users review what they learned. I used the quiz from our Research for Non-Researchers 101 course, created by our Content and Community Director Nick Lioudis, for inspiration.
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Repurpose your existing resources (e.g., support articles, blog content, internal technical documentation) to reduce the workload. Diversify your content formats to make the content more engaging and accessible for folks with different learning styles.
What you should not do: Everything all by yourself. By distributing the content creation work among myself (planning and writing the course content), the CS team (reviewing content for accuracy, recording and editing the videos), and the ops team (contributing technical documentation), I was able to launch with good-quality content without burning myself out.
🧠 Have ideas for courses and certifications you’d like to take? Fill out our course suggestion form and we’ll consider adding your topic to the curriculum.
6. Start marketing pre-launch
Finally, we needed to make sure customers actually knew about the Academy once it launched.
To build momentum, we launched a pre-marketing campaign that included:
- A “coming soon” teaser page on the actual Academy URL to start driving traffic
- Multiple promotional posts on Linkedin to build awareness
- A subscribe form to start building an Academy newsletter pre-launch
- A suggestion form for users to propose course topics and gauge user interests
- An internal enablement guide for the CS team with written snippets, talking points, graphics, and more
- Links to the Academy from CS templates and our main website
💡 The takeaway for other teams:
What to do: Start marketing ahead of time to build awareness and excitement among customers. Use tactics like teaser pages, social media posts, and email campaigns to reach the right users in a variety of channels. If you have time, build subscription forms and other feedback mechanisms to start gathering insight and engagement before launch.
What you should not do: Overpromise features or timelines in your pre-launch messaging—you risk disappointing users if the final product doesn’t match their expectations. However, don’t be afraid to share your tentative plans for the future either! That way, you can start building hype for when you expand into new audiences.
⭐️ If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign up for the Academy newsletter to be notified when new courses drop.
🌊 The initial splash: Early results and lessons learned
In the first week after we launched, we started getting sign-ups for our Academy newsletter, collected a few substantive suggestions for course topics, and received positive feedback from both customers and UI employees.
Although it’s still early days for the Academy, we learned several important lessons that will inform our approach in the future, including:
- Start small and iterate: Starting small allowed us to iterate based on real user feedback while minimizing initial costs and risks. Taking an “MVP” (minimal viable product) approach allowed us to refine the experience without having to invest in more robust tooling.
- Collaboration is key: Aligning cross-functional teams ensured that the content was accurate and relevant, while also spreading out the workload so no individuals or teams were overwhelmed with work.
- Prioritize customer needs: The Academy’s content and format was shaped, first and foremost, by the customer insights collected by our UX research, CS, and sales teams. By addressing common pain points like onboarding challenges, we tailored the Academy to provide immediate value to the customer segments who needed it most.
- Build with scalability in mind: While building in-house was a practical starting point, it also ensured that we’ll have more control and flexibility over how we grow in the future.
🔮 The future: What’s next for the Academy?
After months of hard work and collaboration, I’m excited to start growing the Academy into a go-to resource for researchers. Moving forward, we’ll focus on:
- Expanding the course library to cover more advanced topics
- Exploring gamification and rewards to boost engagement
- Defining a standard process for launching new courses
- Improving the distribution process, especially in collaboration with the CS team
- Analyzing user data to continuously improve the learning experience
In 2025, we’re planning to launch courses covering topics like:
- Unmoderated research
- Screener survey design
- Scaling research teams
- Reporting and managing quotas
- Continuous discovery
- … and more!
💡 Have ideas for courses and certifications you’d like to take? We’re all ears! Fill out this form to send us suggestions for the UI Academy curriculum.
Ultimately, the User Interviews Academy is more than an educational resource; it’s a bridge to deeper customer engagement and success. We’re excited to see how our users leverage it to develop their research skills and unlock the full potential of User Interviews.
🎓 Haven’t checked out the Academy yet? Explore it today and take the first step toward becoming a User Interviews expert.