Sony eLearning
Platform

The problem

Cost, speed, and consistency, all broken at once

Sony needed to modernise how they trained retail staff across Europe. Product information was being distributed slowly and inconsistently, regional teams rebuilt materials locally, introducing delays and version drift. There was no central source of truth, no engagement data, and localisation was a manual rebuild per market.

The brief was clear: build a centralised platform that works across 15+ countries, supports 11+ languages, and can scale without regional production overhead. I was the sole UX/UI Designer on the project at Let's Create, responsible for the learner experience, authoring tools, mobile companion app and analytics dashboard.

Design process

Research first, then build

I ran stakeholder interviews with Sony's product and marketing teams at the start of the engagement to understand the full scope of the distribution problem. That research directly shaped the architecture decision, build a centralised authoring tool, not a shared file system. One content source, pushed everywhere.

I then reviewed Sony's existing training materials with users to understand what wasn't working from the learner's side: content was too long, structure was unclear, and staff had no sense of progress or where they were in a course. Those three problems became the core design constraints for the learning experience.

Key design decisions

Designing for non-technical users at scale

The platform's primary users were retail staff, people who sell Sony products, not product managers or developers. The design had to be intuitive enough to require no training to use the training platform itself.

Three design principles drove every decision:

• Clarity over comprehensiveness. Sony's product catalogue is vast. The temptation was to put everything in. We prioritised what retail staff actually needed on the shop floor, key specs, selling points, and course completion, not the full technical datasheet.
• Progress visibility. Staff needed to know exactly where they were in their training journey. Persistent progress indicators, clear module structures, and completion states were non-negotiable from the first round of user feedback.
• Localisation as a feature, not a fix. The content architecture was designed around the assumption that all content would exist in multiple languages. Translation wasn't an afterthought, it was built into the authoring workflow from day one.

Results

Shipped on time, measured to move

The platform launched on budget and on schedule. Before it existed, Sony had no visibility into whether training was being completed at all, the analytics dashboard I designed changed that. Three months of post-launch iteration, driven by real engagement data, refined the experience in ways upfront research couldn't predict.

The hardest design constraint was scale: every component had to hold up across 11 language variants, including languages with significantly longer word lengths than English. The version that ships globally isn't the most locally-polished, it's the most structurally resilient.