Gamified learning & development | B2B SaaS
Automate league creation | 0 to 1
Challenge 🎯
The employee training managers were spending 4 hours over weekend to create manual training game leagues so that it could run over the weekdays
Goal 📔
Give managers their personal time back by replacing manual league creation with automation
Results 💹
Increased manager's efficiency by 50%+ by automating the creation of league series that increased training win rate by 25%
Let's dive in
Overview
1Huddle
1Huddle is a coaching and development platform that uses quick-burst mobile games to more quickly and effectively educate, elevate, and energize your workforce — from frontline to full-time, in the United States.
NDA
I independently reconstructed this project from inception to completion, using original designs, in compliance with NDA agreements.
My role
· End to end design
· UX research
· Wireframing
· Usability testing
· Interactive prototyping
· Stakeholder engagement
Timeline
8 weeks
Team
Collaborated with product manager, business analyst, QAs, and dev team.
About users 👨👩👧👦
Employee training manager
Age: 30 - 50
Technology friendly
Works within an LMS platform, manages 500+ employees (varies)
Creates training leagues manually over weekends to run on weekdays
Measure success by game completion and winrates
Goals
Enhance employee engagement with trainings
Ensuring training content deliver on time
Challenges
Work-life balance wasn't a preference problem — it was a pipeline problem.
Manual contest creation ran through 3 sequential stages before going live. With the pipeline taking significant processing time, managers had to submit by Saturday to guarantee the contest was live by Monday morning. The weekend work wasn't optional — it was structurally baked into the mechanism itself.
Manually configuring league details, game selection, and rewards took 4+ hours weekend — time carved out of personal life, not work hours.
Handling last-minute changes and updates to training content.
Ensuring consistency and quality across training material for seamless employee training
Keeping up with technology
Older managers might face a steeper learning curve with rapidly evolving technologies.
Handling last-minute changes and updates to training content.
Understanding the "Problem"⁉️
The problem
A manual league creation process is bottlenecked by one person's availability, while the output it feeds into has a fixed, non-negotiable delivery cadence.
Max, an employee training manager, spends 4 hours outside working hours, specifically on weekends, manually creating leagues (a group of games/courses)
This work is squeezed into weekends because the live pipeline is fixed: every league must go live on a weekday, starting Monday.
Manual league today handles 4 weekly leagues-that's the baseline load this person is absorbing alone.
Expanding problem
Single point of failure on capacity - All league creation runs through one training manager's personal time.
The quality risk under time pressure - Because creation is compressed into weekend hours, there's reason to expect course material quality degrades under a rushed timeline.
No headroom for demand spikes - When the number of courses needing creation increases — e.g., new compliance rollouts or org-wide training pushes — the manual process has no way to absorb that surge.
Constraints
24-hour pipeline - Every league moves through three states: first, it goes to draft, then to ready, and within the next 24 hours, it is in a live state.
Fixed live-timing on weekdays - Leagues can only go live Monday–Friday. This isn't a system limitation I can relax — employees consume this training during their working week, so the cadence is tied to when learning actually happens, not to creation convenience.
"Current" user flow 👉
This is how the manual league creation process looks like on a high level.
Positive experience 😀
|
Neutral experience 😐
|
Negative experience 😟
Go to leagues
Clear entrypoint, no friction observed
😀
Create a league
Single clear action, low cognitive load
😀
Choose date + game attempts
Two unrelated decisions in one screen
😐
Add games
Long list with with no recent games shortcut
😐
Add details eg. league name
Naming happens after games and dates are set
😟
Add rules & rewards
Too many steps
😟
Assign players
No clue this was coming as a step
😟
Add trophy
One more step after a long flow
😟
"Possible" solution 💭
Solution 1 - Just fix the UI
The journey map showed real friction: naming happens after games are picked, there's no review screen before a league goes live and steps like "assign players" show up with no warning
A clear flow with recorded steps + a review screen would fix real frictions (like Paul's wrong attempt count incident)
Rejected because - it reduces friction, but the manager still has to manually pick games and rewards every single week. It doesn't touch the actual time sink - repetition.
Solution 2 - templates duplicate last week's league
Let the manager clone last week's setup and just tweak it, instead of rebuilding from scratch.
Rejected because - game selection needs to change based on each cohort's win-rate, a fixed template can't adapt to that and would need manual updating anyway.
Solution 3 - Share the load across the team
Instead of 1 manager doing 4 hours of setup, split league creation across multiple people.
Rejected because - it's an org/process fix, not a product fix. It doesn't recover time, it just spreads the same manual hours across more people.
It's a staffing decision, not a design decision, and it doesn't scale as league volume grows.
Solution 4 - change the pipeline/scheduling logic
Move league creation onto weekdaysso it stops eating into weekends
Rejected because - confirmed with devs ( wo have created it from day 1 ) - this logic is the core to the system from day 1ans can't be changed.
Solution 5 - Automate league creation
Define a league series once , set a single time
Recurrence - weeky for N weeks
Schedule engine triggers each weekly instance - no manual repeat of steps for multiple weeks
Why automation won
Automation was the only option that solved the root cause - a recurring , manual , weekend consuming task.
It also matched was managers already asking for - Megan wanted "set it once, it runs" experience and David was tired of re-entering the same data across tools.
"User interview" insights 🗣
01
Thomas, 36:
"Setting up the league and rewards every weekend takes me about more than an hour, and last month I assigned the wrong reward tier to a league. If that part ran itself, I'd save real time and stop second-guessing it."
Megan, 45:
"I use a scheduling tool for everything else on my team, where I set something up once and it just runs. Coming back to this tool to rebuild the same league by hand every week feels likea step backwards compared to that."
David, 39:
"I have to switch between three different tools just to set up one league — the scheduler, the games library, and the rewards sheet. If those talked to each other, I wouldn't be re-entering the same player list three times for every league."
Paul, 37:
"Twice now I've published a league with the wrong attempt count because I was rushing through the date and games step. There's no review screen before it goes live, so I only catch it after players start complaining."
Sarah, 35:
"My weekdays are packed with meetings and regular tasks, leaving me little time for anything else. Working on manual league creation during weekends is exhausting."
"Data" analytics 📊 (pulled from backend)
League is the most used feature of Maxlearn customers
Weekly leagues are more preferred and created
Active users
10,400
Monthly
Used contests last 30 days
4,370
42% of active users
Leagues created last quarter
12,600
Across all customers
Leagues
"Competitor" analysis 🔍
Competitor name
Ispring learn
Talent lms
Docebo
Cleverstory
Competitor type
Direct
Direct
Direct
Indirect
First impression
Decent
Boring
No trial available
Decent look
Automation
No
No
Yes
No
Feature
Pre-built courses
-
Ai content
Story boards
Visual design
Clean
Outdated
-
Modern & simple
A few LMS products were unavailable for exploration. Among those available, none had AI or automation features for creation.
Few of them gave me templates and thumbnail content inspiration like these below.
"Prioritizing" ideas 💡
Picked for this feature
Not picked, parked for later
Ai suggestion
Suggest auto populated fields to ease managers workload ( leverage AI )
Auto-pick games
System auto-selects games based on set criteria
Give control to managers
Manager can rectify and modify the auto-generated course
Remove repetition
Remove filling details for every input field
Bring fun
How to make creation an enjoyable task? Reward managers on every league creation
Quality check
Give enough time to the managers to go through the content so that the quality doesn't get suffer
Older adult friendly UI
Make the automation easy to use so that the older managers don't struggle
Thumbnail suggestion
System will auto generate thumbnail image for league
Contest data
How would manager know how a league series is performing? Probably through a dashboard
Flexibility
Provide enough flexibility to the managers to do last minute changes/updates to a league
"Visualization 📝" (follow right arrow)
"Visual" style 🎨
Visual Identity Rationale
Maxlearn's visual system had to satisfy two audiences at once: the training manager evaluating it as enterprise software, and the employee experiencing it as a game.
The enterprise register governs structure: clarity, hierarchy, restraint, data-literate layouts, decision-grade visual language
The competitive register governs energy: confidence, momentum, a sense of forward motion and achievement — expressed through typographic weight and directional/diagonal cues
Clean
Readable
Wide - for leaderboard numerics
Communicative
Modern
Professional
Easy to understand
Typography
Montserrat typeface
Hierarchy
Weight
Size
Headline
Bold
32
Title
Bold
20
Sub Title
SemiBold
16
Sub Title
Medium
16
Body
Bold
14
Body
SemiBold
14
Body
Medium
14
Body
Regular
14
Label 1
Medium
13
Label 2
SemiBold
10
Montserrat has a geometric style which reflects the brand, its clear and distinct letterforms enhance readibility.
Label 2 (10px) is used for contest status tags and end-date metadata on contest cards — short, glanceable labels that support the title without competing with it.
"Color" palette 🌈
Primary color - green
#534AB7
Secondary color - black
#2C2C2A
Tertiary color - grey
#F1EFE8
Surface color - white
#FFFFF
Violet was chosen because it sits at the intersection of intelligence and play — it signals that this is a serious learning product that's also genuinely engaging. It's not corporate blue, and it's not aggressive red. It's the color that says 'you're here to grow and win
Business "impact"
Increses manager's efficiency
This feature removes the manual workaround that 70% of users defaulted to, enhanced the manager's efficiency through automation.
Increase winrate 💹
This feature contributes to the primary objectives of employee training and improving win rates.
My "Learnings"
Interested in
working together?
Let's bring your vision to life
Get in contact with me