Built a self-serve tool for partners to manage expiring content, cutting manual work and fueling Go1’s path to 5 Billion learners
Who are we?
Go1 is a global e-learning leader, helping 3.5M+ learners grow through content from 250+ providers. Its SaaS platform enables businesses and partners to deliver tailored, scalable training—all in one seamless solution. Operating as a SaaS platform under both B2B and B2B2C models.
My experience
Over two years at Go1, I led design for self-serve tools, third-party integrations, and AI-powered content management. I helped streamline onboarding, launch a B2B2C partner experience, and create Go1’s first developer portal—key steps in scaling toward the goal of reaching 5 billion learners through embedded learning.
Case#1 - Driving growth through enabling better partner experiences / Unlocking White-label and Embbed experiences
Overview
Manual workflows slowed down Go1’s CSMs and Learning Managers, curating bundles, training course and managing updates through email chains. This inefficiency limited Go1’s ability to scale with larger partners. By introducing self-serve tools, this project removed key blockers and unlocked scalable growth.
My Role
User Research & Data Analysis
Prototypes & Usability Testing
Worked with PMs, Devs, and QA to deliver the product
UX Impact
Streamlined training course management and content lifecycle, delivering a smoother learner experience
Reduced reliance on Customer Success Managers for course updates, improving operational efficiency
Empowered Go1 to scale through seamless onboarding of new Partners
Problems
Challenges Faced by Go1
Problem #01
Go1 served over 5 million learners across 1,600 enterprises, including notable clients like TikTok and the Singaporean government. Aiming to reach 5 billion learners, Go1 faced the challenge of catering to two distinct partner types: those seeking a white-label solution and others desiring seamless integration of Go1's content into their own platforms.
Self-Serve Partner Platform
Partners reselling Go1’s library needed more than a logo swap—they needed true ownership. But the platform offered only basic branding tweaks, like logo uploads and accent colors. Without real control over course offerings, the white-label experience fell short of partner expectations.
Embedded Partner Solution
Some partners wanted Go1’s content—but on their own terms. They needed to embed the library into their platforms, fully controlling the user experience. This meant going beyond surface-level integration to deliver a seamless, branded learning journey without relying on Go1’s UI.
Problem #02
CSMs had to manually track content updates across Go1’s massive library, often missing partner emails about removed or archived courses. This led to outdated bundles, customer complaints, and growing frustration on all sides.
Users problems
Go1’s partners wanted to offer the library as their own—but had no control when content disappeared. Courses were quietly archived by creators, with changes lost in email threads. Hunting down replacements in a massive library drained time and trust. Without visibility or autonomy, partners couldn’t promise a reliable learning experience—whether through self-serve or embedded solutions.
Unlocking the new growth opportunities
I led the design of Go1’s partner enablement strategy—shaping both self-serve and embedded solutions to give partners control over content, reduce reliance on internal teams, and support scalable growth.
Go1’s goal to reach 5 billion learners hinged on two distinct partner models:
Self-Serve Platforms for those white-labeling and reselling the library
Embedded Solutions for partners integrating Go1 content into their own platforms
I focused on deeply understanding each group’s workflows, pain points, and technical constraints—translating those insights into design opportunities that unlocked autonomy and long-term scalability.
Discovery Phase
Who are we solving for?
#1 Persona outline
Self-Serve Resellers
Selena - Learning manager
Interviewed +4
These were small-to-mid-sized partners looking to resell Go1’s content library. They wanted a lightweight, self-managed solution to quickly expand their offering and fill gaps in their existing catalogue.
User goals:
Offer current, high-value content to their customers without relying on Go1’s internal teams
Access a simple, efficient way to manage and curate content
Reduce onboarding friction and operational complexity to focus on business growth
#2 Persona outline
Embedded Partners
Paul - Product Director
Interviewed +2
These were large-scale partners with high volumes of customers and learners who wanted to embed Go1’s library directly into their own platforms. Their goal was to expand their offering without the overhead of sourcing or maintaining content. The challenge was to integrate it seamlessly into their own ecosystem.
User goals:
Deliver a seamless, on-brand experience using Go1 content within their own platform
Ensure flexibility and customisation to meet unique technical or user experience requirements
Always provide up-to-date, high-quality learning content to their customers
Analysing inconsistency in partners integration with Go1
To gain deeper insights into partner workflows, I analyzed the integration behavior of 18 partners across five strategic partner types. This research was thoroughly documented and shared internally to enhance visibility into how different partners interact with and integrate Go1’s systems. The findings highlighted both technical and design requirements essential for supporting a diverse range of partner needs.
Analysis
Partner Experience mapping analysis
I conducted an in-depth analysis of partner workflows—from integration setup and content discovery to learner management and reporting.
Key findings included:
Many partners integrated with multiple content providers, making consistency and control critical.
Content management and learner experience were fragmented, with manual processes and broken workflows slowing teams down.
Reporting tools lacked the functionality to track training compliance effectively, forcing admins to patch together updates manually—leading to missed insights and a disjointed experience for both admins and learners.
What do our customers want to share with us?
I interviewed six partners to understand their content management workflows across the full lifecycle — from onboarding and curation to retirement, support and ran analysis on Zendesk and Intercom to better understand highlighting a lack of visibility and control over content status and the needs for the White-label or Embedded solution
#1
Flexibility: The system must accommodate varying partner models and regional needs.
#2
Transparency: Partners want visibility into when content changes occur, especially to maintain compliance — many were unclear about how the content lifecycle was managed.
#3
Autonomy: There is a clear need to manage content independently without relying on Go1’s internal processes.
#4
Quality control: Partners want tools to collect and act on learner feedback to maintain high content standards.
#5
Integration: Partners expect a seamless experience across sales, management, maintenance, and support.
“ My customers are having issues with assigned content — learners can’t access it.”
What do our CMS want to share with us?
In interviews with four Go1 Customer Success Managers, a clear pattern of friction emerged:
#1
400–800 pieces of content are retired each month from the Go1 Premium library. Only internal teams are notified—leaving it to them to manually alert partners via email, creating a bottleneck.
#2
10–20% of support tickets created due to broken or missing content links. With no direct line of communication, partners were blindsided by content changes, resulting in disrupted learning experiences and frustrated admins, managers, and learners.
“We’ve noticed issues when partners are accessing Go1 content. There’s no warning and no replacements, causing huge issues for partners.”
What best-in-class LMS platforms are doing right
#1
Integration into Existing Ecosystems: Seamless integration with existing LMS, LXP, HRIS, and compliance systems is essential for operational efficiency.
#2
White-label control: Some platforms offer full customization—from domain to UI—giving brands complete control over the learning experience. Ideal for customer education, partner training, or monetized content where brand consistency matters.
#3
Quality Control for Regulated or Compliance-Heavy Industries: Strong curation or partner vetting is essential for meeting regulatory requirements and maintaining learner trust.
#4
Personalisation on learning based on roles or skills: Enhances learner engagement by leveraging data such as job roles, skill levels, and behavioural history to surface relevant content, intelligent recommendations reduce friction in the learning journey and improve outcomes by aligning content with individual and organisational goals.
#5
Licensing Flexibility: Adaptable licensing models—such as per-user, per-course, or usage-based pricing
Delivery Phase
Design and Development
Based on our research, we defined a strategy focused on flexibility, transparency, and partner autonomy. The solution needed to support a wide variety of partner interfaces while also aligning with Go1’s platform standards. Those are the key design considerations:
Lifecycle Transparency: Introduced content lifecycle visibility so partners could proactively manage retiring content, preventing learner disruption and maintaining compliance continuity.
Content Evaluation Signals Empowered by AI: Incorporated learner ratings and approval indicators. We tested a combination of AI-generated suggestions, AI + content partner curation, and manual feedback loops to determine the most trusted experience for partners.
Self-Serve Discovery: Enabled Learning Managers to explore multiple course options per topic and select the most relevant content for their library, reducing reliance on Go1 support.
Embedded designs applied: Designed the solution to adapt across different partner platforms, support multiple languages, and accommodate region-specific compliance requirements.
Experience for Embedded solutions
What’s next: unlocking growth through flexibility
We focused first on the most painful workflows for internal teams and partners. Next, we’ll empower partners with flexible sales tools—like bundles and content recommendations—to create smoother experiences for learning managers and learners, and drive scalable growth.
Validation Phase
From the prototype to the finished product
We designed high-fidelity prototypes and ran unmoderated usability tests with three key partners—exploring three distinct concepts to ensure usability, relevance, and alignment with real-world needs.
Concept 1 : Engage the L&D team in discovering related content for Learning Managers.
✅ Pros: Improved quality of content suggestions.
❌ Cons: Elevated workload for L&D, decreased curated content volume, higher likelihood of L&D recommending the same content over time.
Concept 2: Explore AI to find related content for Learning Managers.
✅ Pros: Reduced workload for L&D, prompt results
❌ Cons: Development cost (reusing existing code), potential initial limitations in the quality of suggestions from the data model.
Concept 3:
A mix of Concept 1 and Concept 2 to find related content for Learning Managers.
✅ Pros: Improved quality of content suggestions and prompt results
❌ Cons: High cost for internal teams and development
Success criteria
Retention Rate: Maintain a retention rate of over 35% for partners engaging with the new content management experience.
Support Load Reduction: Reduce partner support tickets related to disappearing or retired content by more than 15%.
Content Replacement Adoption: Achieve an acceptance rate of at least 44% for AI-generated content replacement suggestions.
Notification Engagement: Increase the number of users opting in for content retirement notifications over the project baseline.
| Design Hypothesis | User Feedback |
|---|---|
| AI will provide relevant content replacements | Users liked the simplicity but questioned AI reliability for compliance decisions, so we needed to get users feedback on AI recommendation, and ability give quantitative and qualitative feedback. |
| Users want to be notified about retiring content | They want early notifications to act before it impacts learner experience. |
| Users want visibility into when content will be retired | Considered essential for staying compliant and avoiding service disruption. |
| Users want to manage retiring content (discard or replace) | Confirmed — users want full control to update libraries proactively. | Users want to preview retiring content and suggested replacements | Users prefer to compare options before acting to ensure quality and relevance. |
Received strong feedback, which led to valuable improvements — including the opportunity to capture partner email addresses to establish a communication channel that previously didn’t exist, and the introduction of visual indicators to highlight content requiring partner action.
Users need visual indicators to highlight pending actions for retiring content.
User feedback
“Users want to know when there are actions required before they reach the retirement page.”
Through testing, we discovered that users were frequently overlooking content that required their attention, as the action indicators were not clearly visible or easily discoverable.
Updates after feedback
Improve indicators for pending retirement items that have not been actioned yet
“I can notice there is something for me to check over there”
Customer wants notifications: More Than a UX Fix—A Strategic Opportunity to Build Trust and Strengthen Relationships
Prior to this project, Go1 had no direct line of communication with Learning Managers using embedded partner solutions, limiting its ability to support these end users.
To close this gap and deliver meaningful value, we introduced a content retirement notification system that collected email addresses from Learning Managers. This initiative not only bridged the communication divide but also empowered Go1 to proactively engage with users beyond its immediate customer base—strengthening trust, increasing platform influence, and opening new relationship-building opportunities with end users.
Collaborated closely with developers to refine the solution, implement changes, and ensure smooth integration into existing systems.
Established post-launch tracking to monitor feature adoption and inform ongoing iteration.
Rollout Phase
Business impact
Check more about the transition on MyGo1 to Go1 Learn, which has become the core product of Go1.
Check out more information about the help doc for content retirement
#1
Reduced CSM effort for content retirement updates to zero, fully automating the process
#2
Streamlined training course management and content lifecycle, delivering a smoother learner experience
#3
Growth: This solution has evolved into the central platform that supports not only partners and those seeking standalone solutions but also serves as the primary resource for learning managers and learners alike.
Next steps
Conduct usability testing with beta users to gather feedback on AI recommendations.
Refine the design and concept based on user feedback.
Test various labels and indicators through targeted experiments.
Enhance the notification component within the design system.
Learnings
Small interactions – Go1 lacked direct communication channels with content partners. Capturing partner emails for course updates created a simple but scalable way to close that gap and build ongoing engagement.
Early in the project, we lacked dedicated developer support. To move forward, my PM and I worked with the business to clearly define strategic value and demonstrate early ROI. By aligning the initiative with Go1’s vision of reaching 5 billion learners, we secured cross-functional engineering support. What began as a low-capacity initiative evolved into one of the company’s highest-impact growth projects.
Design is a critical bridge between product vision and operational execution, especially in B2B SaaS, where long-term scalability often depends on solving practical, unglamorous problems well.
What THEY Say about me
“Joyce is highly skilled at solving customer problems by creating intuitive user experiences (often in very technical product domains). I have always admired her ability to uncover the root cause of problems, ask insightful questions, and challenge design boundaries.
Her resilience and adaptability made her an invaluable asset to our team. Joyce’s willingness to embrace change and turn it into an advantage significantly contributed to the team’s ability to thrive in dynamic environments. She not only met challenges head-on but also found innovative solutions that propelled our team forward.
Joyce’s commitment to staying ahead of the curve in terms of industry knowledge and trends speaks volumes about her proactive mindset and dedication to excellence. She constantly shows great leadership in sharing her learnings with the team, and also as a design industry mentor.
I 100% endorse Joyce for any senior or leadership design role! 🌟”
THANKS FOR CHECKING IT OUT
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