Designing a guided decision-making experience for uncertain learners

👋🏼Overview

Users don’t struggle to find courses, they struggle to decide which one is right for them.

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“Help Me Decide a Course” (HMDC) is a guided onboarding feature built for SkillUp that helps users clarify their goals, skill level, and preferences to receive personalized course recommendations.

Rather than relying on traditional browsing or filtering, this experience reframes course discovery as a guided decision journey. The goal was to reduce friction, build user confidence, and convert uncertainty into meaningful action.

This feature sits at a critical point in the user journey—where curiosity meets confusion—and transforms it into clarity and direction.

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✨ Project Overview

Briefly introduce the project so people understand the context at a glance.

🎯 Problem Statement

SkillUp offers a wide range of courses across domains like AI, data science, and human skills. While this breadth is valuable, it unintentionally created a new challenge: too many choices without enough guidance.

Users entering the platform were often unsure about:

• What domain they should pursue
• Their current skill level
• How different courses align with their career goals

This resulted in a pattern of behavior where users would browse multiple pages, compare courses superficially, and eventually drop off without making a decision.

At its core, the problem wasn’t about discovery, it was about decision-making under uncertainty.

👤 Goal

The goal of this project was to design an experience that simplifies complex decision-making and supports users in identifying the right course path.

Specifically, the feature aimed to:

• Help users reflect on their interests, goals, and current abilities
• Reduce cognitive overload caused by too many options
• Provide structured guidance instead of passive browsing
• Deliver personalized recommendations with high relevance
• Convert users into qualified, high-intent leads

👤 My Role

I was responsible for shaping the experience from a user-centered and product-focused perspective.

My contributions included:

• Understanding user psychology and decision behavior
• Designing the question framework that drives the experience
• Structuring the end-to-end onboarding flow
• Creating wireframes and UI in Figma
• Collaborating on implementation logic and system mapping

This required balancing user needs with business objectives, ensuring the feature was both helpful and impactful.