Evolving the homepage for a more unified Udemy

In May, Udemy CEO Greg Brown shared that we’ve kicked off work to unify the Udemy platform, making it easier for learners and organizations to understand all the ways they can learn with us. We’re excited to share more about how this work will come to life in the coming months, starting with changes to the homepage for English visitors.

 

What’s changing?

 

We’ve kicked off a series of tests to help us optimize the Udemy homepage for future growth. Over the coming months, when you visit Udemy.com in English, you may see new designs and informational modules, like the ones pictured below. We’ll gather information about how new visitors interact with these elements. After testing, we’ll implement the ones that resonate most with learners and organizational buyers, and perform best in terms of revenue and subscription leads.

 

 

Why are we evolving the logged-out homepage? 

 

You can think of Udemy’s logged-out homepage as our front door. For many new learners, it’s their first impression of Udemy, and where they go to decide if they want to “enter” and learn with us. 

 

Today, a first-time visitor to Udemy sees something a bit like an online department store: immediate offers of things to buy, without a lot of context on what’s being sold. We’ve heard from first-time visitors that this page can be disorienting because it pushes them to purchase something without helping them understand what is actually being offered.

 

Furthermore, an increasing number of our visitors are considering Udemy not just for themselves, but for their organizations. The current page misses the chance to inform these valuable potential customers about the full spectrum of options that might serve their needs. 

 

We see all this data and feedback as an opportunity to refresh our logged-out homepage to better connect visitors to the experiences they need, whether they’re individuals, managers, or organizational leaders. We believe a more unified home page can deliver a more complete first impression and unlock future growth. 

 

We’ll begin this refresh with the English language home page in the United States. Eventually, we plan to use what we learn in our tests to expand to future countries and languages. 

 

What are our goals with these tests?

 

Our winning design should deliver more high-quality leads for subscriptions while maintaining the healthy marketplace that makes Udemy unique and vibrant. With these tests, we seek to capitalize on our biggest growth opportunity – Udemy Business – and deliver value for quality instructors in professional skills. We’ll measure impact to traffic, engagement, purchases, subscription leads and starts, and of course instructor payouts. 

 

What should instructors do?

 

We’re working to be the #1 skill-building solution for professional learners and enterprise organizations. If you’re already focused on helping learners achieve their career goals by providing fresh, unique, high-quality learning experiences, you’re doing the right things to succeed on the Udemy platform. 

 

If you’re not sure you’re doing this today, we have lots of new and updated resources on how to serve professional learners. Here are a few:

• Video course: How to Create an Online Course: The Official Udemy Course
• Article: Optimize your course for Udemy Business 
• Tool: Udemy Business Performance insights (for instructors who already have content in Udemy Business)
• Webinar replay: Learning Design with Udemy Staff (English only)

 

What’s next? 

 

As we work on the “front door,” there’s still lots of work happening in the rest of the house. This includes new features to equip you to meet the needs of professional learners, like better tools for hands-on learning and improved insights into your performance. It also includes enabling more learners to take advantage of subscriptions. For example, we’re working to introduce local currency support for Udemy Business Team Plan in several new regions. We’re also making it easier for subscribers to identify certification prep content and discover relevant learning moments with assistance from AI. 

 

Instructors are central to Udemy’s mission to improve lives through learning. We’re excited to deepen our investment in professional skills development with you, and we’ll keep you posted about the evolution of the home page. 

As always, we welcome your thoughts, questions, and feedback in the Instructor Community.