ABO Academy
ABO Academy, also known as IBO Academy in North America, is an educational web app designed for Amway’s Independent Business Owners across the globe.
Time
2023-2025, Amway Corp.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
Engineers & PM
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
The Challenge: Take the education section of Amway's Creators+ native app and expand it out with its own visual style, brand, and improved user experience so that it may stand alone as a web app. A purely Academy native app never existed, so this new web experience had to be built from the ground up while maintaining the original version's functionality.
Overall Functionality: As a platform, Academy exists to allow users access to a multitude of market-provided educational courses in the form of videos, worksheets, PDFs, and more. These courses vary in length, subject matter, language availability, region availability, user access level, and even legal requirements. They can exist as standalone courses or be organized into playlists called "Learning Paths."
The Core Loop for Users: In its most simple golden path form, the core loop for Academy users is browsing for and accessing course materials to improve their understanding on any given topic. With the inclusion of Learning Paths, Favorites, Achievements, Search, and Profile settings, it gets a bit more complicated.
For the full sitemap; complicate it.
Figma Demo
Interactive demo for the basic course flow. Extraneous navigation is disabled. Click the expand button for the best experience. Scroll up and down on the dashboard until you find the appropriately named "Example Course for Demo."
(Must be viewed on Desktop)
Making It Work for Everyone: The sheer range of users and countries involved means that there will always be requests for special cases and exceptions made within the design. Different markets have different tastes, customs, and regulatory requirements. For the most part, the strategy held by my Design Director and my PM was to try to keep things as globally consistent as possible, but there were some notable exceptions. It was part of my job to figure out how to translate these special needs into the designs. For example, the Vietnamese release of Academy Web had to adhere to their government's new rules regarding training time. We ultimately implemented a system that forced users to complete a series of required courses before gaining access to the whole site.
The Impact: In addition to the untold increases in productivity and profit generated by better-educated Amway Business Owners, this initiative had a direct impact on contracted-support spending. It also proved to be an overall more engaging and intuitive experience. The Academy team and I went on to make changes to the original native experience to reflect the improvements made on web.