The Project
Mivvy is a fully functional online learning platform for women to gain high-value leadership skills. I founded Mivvy in late 2018.
Similar to Skillshare or Udemy, the platform hosts online courses. Users can create an account, browse, and purchase a course.
Courses themselves contain text and downloadable resources, hosted on AWS.
Product Design
The application is structured around course purchases. The goal is to minimize friction around purchasing a course. To create a good UX, I took three things into consideration:
- Course discoverability: finding courses to browse should be seamless (one click)
- Course purchase: purchasing a course should be two clicks away from the homepage, three if not logged in yet
- Course access: a purchased course should be accessible immediately and easily recoverable
To create trust, in addition to the usual testimonials, I added pictures of the course experts throughout the app.
The home page, optimized for trust, with three "browse courses" CTAs
The course purchase process
The home page, optimized for trust, with three "browse courses" CTAs
Visual Design
The feel I wanted to create for Mivvy is professional yet comforting. I wanted to capture female leadership, which mixes power and softness.
To create that sense of "soft power", I used strong primary colors (pink, blue) and a softer secondary pastel color palette, along with handmade illustrations.
Marketing Strategy and SEO
The objective is to attract users to the platform.
To do so, I am implementing 3 strategies.
The first strategy is to create partnerships with women-focused groups in universities (business clubs, sororities). In exchange for a promotional code for their members, these groups market Mivvy to their user lists.
The second strategy is to improve SEO with trusted backlinks. To do so, a Product Hunt and Indie Hacker launch is planned. I am also building relationships with Forbes contributors.
The third strategy is to create good and shareable content. I will launch a blog that features women's stories and high-quality advice-driven posts. These women will then spread the word by linking their featured articles on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Tech Stack
The result is a responsive web application, optimized for readability.
It’s a Ruby on Rails (Rails v. 5.0) application. It is integrated with the Stripe and Mailchimp APIs. The front-end is HTML5 (Slim), CSS3 (SCSS), Javascript and JQuery. The application is hosted on heroku and version controlled in bitbucket. The database runs on Postgres.
Tech Stack
APIs
The application is stored on a private bitbucket repository. You can request access here.