BACKGROUND

Udacity’s content creation tool (Coco) created for program instructors to build out their lessons for the students to digest.

But a tale too common to many start-ups, Coco was an internal tool that did not get a lot of loving. Since the early days of Udacity, it was a placeholder that held its place and built upon. As Udacity evolved and the business grew exponentially, Coco could no longer handle the volume and complexity of the use cases.

Coco now needed to accommodate for multi-users, with multi-versions, working with multi-dependencies.

Objective: To build out new product features (within the existing platform) that will unblock and destress our content creators.

PROCESS

Research
Coco had become so hard to use that our Content Creators would do everything in Google Docs and manually copy and paste everything back into Coco section by section. Users were also scared to edit content in Coco because so many Lessons would be linked to other Lessons in other Nanodegrees - it was unclear what the ramifications would be until it was too late.

Solution
Insight through rounds of internal stakeholder interviews and testing revealed that most actionable way to help would be to develop a tool that would allow multiple drafts and versions to coexist for each program. Multi-drafts would allow The complexity to ensuring all the edge cases for all the users would be accounted for required input across the company. The model was based loosely around GitHub’s and Google Doc’s but because of the inter-dependencies of previous lesson material certain additional protocols had to be implemented as well.