Cancellation Workflow

UX // UI

Summary

August - October 2022

I led the design of a new cancellation workflow for D2L Wave’s course catalogue, addressing a major usability pain point and eliminating our most common support ticket.

Context & Problem

D2L Wave (now SkillsWave) is a corporate upskilling platform that connects employees with thousands of learning programs.

However, the platform initially lacked a workflow for Employees to cancel their own course requests. Instead, users had to submit support tickets, creating a significant volume of manual work for the customer support team.

My Role:

As the primary Product Designer on this project, I was responsible for designing a self-service cancellation workflow. My goal was to improve the user experience while reducing the burden on our support team, which had no way to process cancellations after a request reached the "Paid" state.

What I Did

I collaborated with our customer support team to learn about their cancellation process. This helped me gain empathy for their workload and understand all the steps involved.

I then mapped out the various states of an application, which could be bucketed into two categories:

  • Before payment: Learners awaited approval from their company’s representative.

  • After payment: Learners waited for enrollment by the Education Partner, and cancellation required manual intervention.

This helped me identify an opportunity: We could allow Learners to cancel their own requests before payment while guiding them to support for cancellations beyond that stage.

Design Iteration

Before Payment: Self-service cancellation

When a request was in the “Approved” state (before payment), a Cancel button was enabled, allowing Learners to cancel directly. They had to provide a reason, which was shared with approvers for transparency.

After Payment: Guided Support

When an employee had already paid, the process was a bit more difficult, as it required action on the Education Partner’s website, and was subject to their institution’s cancellation policy (i.e. out of D2L’s hands).

To solve this, when a request was in “Paid,” “Registration Sent,” or “Enrolled,” the Cancel button was disabled, and a tooltip directed Learners to reach out to support, aligning with Education Partner policies.

Result

This redesign completely eliminated support tickets related to cancellation requests, achieving a 100% reduction in these cases. By enabling self-service cancellation at the appropriate stage, we improved efficiency for both users and the support team, allowing them to focus on more complex issues.

This project demonstrated how a thoughtful UX solution could significantly improve both user experience and business operations.