At Reforge, our members are the guiding force behind everything we do. From the intensive design of each lesson to determining which new programs to launch, everything is designed with your experience top of mind. That's why our team is always hard at work behind the scenes looking for ways to improve our membership offerings. This fall, we’re proud to announce our latest enhancement with the launch of the Cohort Viewer.
As the gateway to each live program, we saw a chance to optimize our dashboard for members. The Cohort Viewer enables you to take in the bigger picture of your cohort experience, removing the amount of guesswork that members previously had to devote to preparation. Additionally, this new feature enables them to see who they’re learning alongside, message support with any question, and gain immediate access to the community Slack channel.
Building Your All-in-One Dashboard
When it comes to building products for real people, it’s important to keep in mind that life’s what happens when you’re busy making plans. Not every item on our to-do list gets crossed off, meetings get double-booked, and calls are interrupted; that’s why planning ahead can be a lifesaver. Following our Spring ‘21 Cohort, one piece of feedback in particular stuck out to us. Members consistently reported that a better program schedule would help them to get more out of their Reforge experience. In the event a member fell behind with their content or missed an event, it could be difficult for them to know what to prioritize in their next session.
Given the way we previously showcased the schedule in our dashboard, this feedback didn’t come as a surprise—but it was important for us to address. That setup didn’t allow for long-term planning, made weekly planning more complicated, and created a lot of friction for members around understanding what to do next. What’s more, tasks, events, and content from prior weeks weren’t centralized in one place. It was crucial to us to make sure we built a scheduling feature that would give members easier access to a birds-eye view of their program in addition to more granular info about each upcoming week.
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Reforge Experience
From the beginning, we envisioned the Cohort Viewer as a critical way to set members up for success; a one-stop-shop to review everything related to their Reforge journey. By mining member feedback, we identified the three core goals we wished to deliver in designing this feature. We designed the Cohort Viewer to help you:
Plan your schedule.
Approach the next few weeks of your program.
Anticipate what to do next.
Keeping these three goals in mind enabled us to land on an elegant way to help you approach your daily and weekly planning with a single core feature—the Program Overview. Next, we zoomed out to address a common pain point members reported around uncertainty over where to go for cohort-related tasks. It became clear to us that the Cohort Viewer should serve as a reliable launch pad for cohort-specific activities and easy access to things like our program Slack channels. Finally, we wanted the new dashboard to feel intuitive and not overwhelming, with a dedicated entry point to contextualize it within the rest of Reforge.
Let's Wrap This Up
First, and foremost, the new Cohort Viewer is optimized to help you track your progress during intense learning sprints. When you log in, you'll first encounter a front-door to enable quick navigation with one-click access to what you’re most likely to be looking for. From there, an Overview Tab grants members the ability to see what their cohort is covering and when, with clearly listed cohort events and content organized by weekly blocks. This is especially convenient if you've fallen behind in your content (real talk; it happens to the best of us). Now you can easily see what you missed and decide what to skip or catch up on. Let’s say you’ve got a busy week at work, it’s now possible to preview upcoming content and scheduled events. These enhancements also make it easier to anticipate what content you’re unlikely to get to that week, offering you the chance to be more proactive and plan ahead of time. You can also message our Support Team or access your program Slack channel all from within the Cohort Viewer.
As we continue to grow Reforge into the best professional development membership in tech, your voice is the one that matters most. Listening to your feedback is our number one priority, and we can't wait to see what you think. We understand how important it is to be able to concentrate and set aside the time you need as you strive to learn something new. We hope you'll use the time gained back to focus on your program material, catch up on anything you missed, and keep track of upcoming live events. Looking to the future, our team is excited to continue mining your input for opportunities to deliver even more value to your Reforge experience.
Curious to see the Cohort Viewer in action? Become a Reforge Member today.