Portfolio- Joshua Hochman

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Understanding Our Client and Their Market

To set ourselves up for success, we first needed to learn about our client’s motivations.

  • Question 1

    Who are their target customers?

  • Question 2

    How do they aim to deliver value to these customers?

  • Question 3

    What aspects of their product make it unique in an already crowded marketplace?

Using insights gathered from our initial meeting with the client, we developed a

Business Model Canvas (BMC)

to visualize our understanding of Guide as a company.

Using the BMC helped us understand and visualize the key elements of Guide's mission: the value proposition of their product, their target customers, the essential elements required for users to want to use it, and the plan for generating revenue.

Research

In order to develop a baseline understanding for designing a search experience, we first needed to conduct preliminary research on the competitive landscape for search features on existing learning and training platforms.

Our Key Research Questions:

  • # 1

    What are the primary goals and tasks for users when using search for HR training materials?

  • # 2

    How do competitors organize and present their training content, and what navigation structures do they utilize to facilitate search?

  • # 3

    What aspects of Guide make it unique in an already crowded marketplace?

  • # 4

    What features would users consider essential or desirable in a search experience for learning?

Field Research

To understand what makes a digital search effective, we performed a literature review to explore existing design patterns.

Competitor Analysis

Knowing that learning platforms already exist:

What does Guide need to do to stand out?

How does their platform compare to existing product solutions?

We compared Guide to five established businesses that our client identified as competitors. By examining each company's website and YouTube media content, we found we could compare their offerings within six generalized categories. While each competitor was different, all five offered navigational searches with AI-generated suggestions.
I developed a three axis visualization to compare Guide to each of its competitors, adding Cornerstone as an additional rival not identified by our client. The horizontal axis represents each platform's complexity, while the vertical axis indicates whether the product leans more toward short or long form content. Each product is represented by a circle whose size indicates the degree to which its users can create increasingly sophisticated content. We expect our project to increase our client's search complexity offering, making them more comparable to TalentLMS.

Final Recommendations to Client

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When designing a search experience:

Introduce Personalized Recommendations

Suggest content based on user’s past activity or popular courses.

Use Predictive Search

Implement autocomplete to reduce search time and show relevant results.

Enable Microlearning Previews

Display short summaries or lesson previews in search results for easy scanning.

Design Search Paths and Learning Journeys

Provide suggested learning paths based on search keywords and user behavior.

Academic Portfolio
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© 2025 Joshua Hochman