Lead UX Product Designer at Redware — designing Volvo's global dealer training platform across 25+ countries, tackling skill-fade, video content architecture, and cross-border delivery challenges.
Visual designs and proprietary platform data cannot be shared under the terms of this engagement. The process, contributions, and outcomes documented here reflect my actual work on this project.
Volvo required a global Learning Management System to standardise dealer staff training across their international network — from product knowledge and compliance training through to technical certification programmes. The platform was delivered through Redware, a specialist platform agency where I served as Lead UX Product Designer.
My responsibilities spanned discovery workshops with Volvo stakeholders across multiple markets, through to a complete design system and developer handoff. The complexity was significant: six distinct user roles, multi-language content, and a series of genuinely difficult technical and UX challenges — from skill-fade science to cross-border content delivery.
The global nature of this project meant research couldn't be a single-country exercise. We needed to understand how training worked — and where it broke down — across fundamentally different operating contexts.
Ran structured discovery workshops with Volvo stakeholders in the UK, Sweden, and Germany. Used card-sorting and priority mapping to surface conflicting assumptions between markets and establish a shared definition of success across the business.
Observed dealers in UK showrooms completing training tasks using existing disparate systems. Found that staff were maintaining parallel paper-based records because they didn't trust the digital system to be available or accurate when they needed it.
Mapped six user roles — Learner, Line Manager, Trainer, Regional Admin, Content Author, and System Admin — and documented their distinct needs, mental models, and tolerance for complexity. Needs varied dramatically across the same user type in different markets.
Reviewed Volvo's existing training video library and discovered that the tagging system was inconsistent and poorly structured — making content discovery difficult and automated recommendations unreliable. This became a key design challenge beyond just the interface itself.
"When I need the certificate to show a customer, I can never find it. I just end up saying 'trust me, I'm qualified.'"— Dealer technician, UK showroom, contextual inquiry session
The synthesis challenge was to identify design principles that worked across all markets and roles, while building in enough flexibility for local adaptation.
Individual journey maps for each role, showing where they intersected and where their needs diverged. The Learner and Manager journeys revealed a critical misalignment: managers needed at-a-glance team progress dashboards that the existing system didn't support at all.
"Progress should be visible at all times," "Certification should be available instantly, anywhere," and "The system should require zero training to use." These became acceptance criteria throughout the build and gave us a shared language for resolving design disagreements with stakeholders.
Before designing the interface, the video content tagging system needed fixing. Worked with Volvo's content team to implement a new structured taxonomy — consistent attribute sets across modules, standardised difficulty and role tagging, and prerequisite linking between content items. This unlocked reliable search and automated recommendations.
Beyond the standard complexity of a global enterprise platform, this project had four specific design problems that required original solutions.
Research confirmed what Volvo already suspected: training knowledge fades within weeks without reinforcement. I designed a spaced repetition system that tracked each user's training history and prompted them with targeted knowledge checks as content aged. If a user's score fell below a defined threshold, the system flagged the requirement to retrain on that module. The UX challenge was surfacing this without it feeling punitive — framing prompts as performance support rather than compliance enforcement.
Volvo operates across China, where direct platform access faces Great Firewall restrictions. Working with the Redware engineering team, I helped shape the UX around a packaging and reassembly architecture — content was bundled for delivery, passed through to the China-side infrastructure, and reassembled for the local learner. The design challenge was ensuring the user experience remained seamless and responsive regardless of where in this pipeline the content was being served. This required designing explicit offline and sync states into every content interaction.
Designed a feature enabling employees to explore and apply for internal moves between countries and regions. The system pulled each user's training portfolio, competency profile, and certifications — presenting a personalised readiness view for any posted vacancy. For managers reviewing applications, I designed a comparative candidate view that surfaced training gaps alongside transfer eligibility. This turned the LMS from a pure training system into a talent mobility tool.
Designed distinct dashboard views for each of the six user roles, sharing underlying components but surfacing only what was relevant to that user. Three rounds of remote usability testing across UK, Germany, and Sweden — using translated prototypes — surfaced localisation issues that would have required costly rework post-launch, particularly around label truncation in German and content hierarchy differences between markets.
Dealerships onboarded in the 12 months following launch
Reduction in training administration time across participating markets
Task completion rate in post-launch usability benchmarking, up from 54% baseline
The design system was delivered as a fully documented Figma library with over 200 components, each with annotated usage guidelines and edge-case documentation. The library was built to be handed over to Volvo's internal design team for ongoing maintenance.
A phased rollout began with five pilot markets, allowing real-world data to inform final adjustments before full global deployment. The "zero training required to use the system" principle was validated when new dealership onboarding was completed without any formal system training sessions.
The skill-fade system in particular generated strong internal feedback — it turned a compliance requirement into something users described as genuinely useful, helping them feel more confident in customer-facing situations where product knowledge mattered.
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