Education · India · 2020
GoDaddy Academy: 3,200+ learners in year one, certificates in under a minute
GoDaddy India wanted a certification that meant something in the Indian market. Before anyone drew a screen, we helped work out what to certify and how a learner should move through it. Then we built the system that registers, assesses and certifies them.
- Client
- GoDaddy India (GoDaddy Academy)
- Market
- India
- Engagement
- Research and discovery, then platform build
- Timeline
- 5 months
- In care since
- 2020
- Platforms
- Web
- Capabilities
- Product and UX DesignWeb Engineering
3,200+
learners registered in year one
41%
of sign-ups through partner referrals
Under a minute
from final review to certificate
The context
A certificate is only as good as its programme
GoDaddy India was exploring certification programmes in skills such as web development and cybersecurity, for students, early career professionals and people building their first business website. The ambition was clear. The shape was not. Which certifications would matter to Indian learners and the people who hire them? And how should someone move from sign-up to a certificate they would be proud to share?
We joined as research and platform partner, working with senior GoDaddy stakeholders. Our co-founder Prem Raval had already worked on the programme as a research and development associate, so we arrived knowing the goals, the people and the questions nobody had answered yet.
The challenge
The first question was not what the website should look like
A certification earns trust through three things: a curriculum that matters, an assessment that is hard to fake and a learner experience that is clear from the first click. The product had to hold all three together without burying the programme team in manual admin.
There was a commercial layer too. Partners would bring learners in, and the platform had to know who referred whom, fairly and automatically, from the first registration to the last certificate.
Our approach
How we worked
Research and product design ran side by side, so what we learned from learners changed the system before it was built, not after.
- 01
Listen & Learn
We spoke with students and early career learners about what a certificate would be worth to them, what would make them finish a course rather than drift away, and what an employer would need to see.
- 02
Map & Measure
Demand research narrowed the list of possible certifications to the ones most likely to matter in India. The findings shaped the programme structure and the product at the same time, which is how it should be.
- 03
Sketch & Shape
We mapped the learner path end to end: discover, register, learn, submit practical work, take the assessment, get reviewed, receive the certificate. Every step was prototyped and walked through with GoDaddy's team before a line of it was built.
- 04
Build & Break
Registration, referrals, assessment and certification were built in parallel sprints and demonstrated every Friday. Before launch Prem sat the practical assessment himself, as an ordinary learner, and his notes became the fix list for the review screens.
- 05
Launch & Land
Launch and go to market support: partner onboarding kits, a help centre for learners and training for the reviewers who mark practical work.
What we built
What we built
A programme turned into a product, with the admin kept small enough for a lean team to run.
Programme and market research
Learner interviews, demand analysis and support for choosing which certifications to offer first, written up so the programme team could defend every choice.
Registration and referrals
Learners join directly or through a partner link. Every referral is tracked to its source, so partners can see who they brought in and the programme can reward them fairly.
Learning and assessment
After the learning material, participants move into an assessment that combines theory questions, case work and a practical website building task. Knowing something is not the same as being able to build it, and the test reflects that.
Marks and review
Automatic marking for the objective parts and a review queue for practical work, where human judgement matters. Reviewers see the brief, the submission and the rubric on one screen.
Automated certificates
Once every requirement is met, the certificate is generated, issued and emailed automatically, each with its own ID, in under a minute from the final review.
The outcome
What changed
More than 3,200 learners registered in the first year, and 41% of them arrived through partner referrals, which proved the partner model was more than a nice idea. Certificates went out in under a minute from final review, so the moment of finishing felt like finishing, not like waiting.
The lasting lesson was about boundaries. Learning products cannot be split into content and technology as neatly as a project plan suggests. The assessment model changes the interface. The partner model changes registration. The credibility of the certificate changes what the system has to record. Good decisions came from looking at the programme as a whole, which is how we approach product and UX design for every learning platform now.
They helped us decide what the certificate should stand for before they built anything. That is a big part of why learners took it seriously.
Care & Grow
After launch
In our care since 2020
We stayed on through the first year of cohorts on a care plan: releases between cohorts, monitoring during assessment windows and a short list of improvements that came straight from learners and reviewers. The most useful was a public verification page, so an employer can check that a certificate is genuine in seconds.
At the end of that year we handed GoDaddy's team full documentation, a runbook for each cohort cycle and the partner reports they relied on, so the programme could run confidently without us in the room.
Who worked on it
- UX researcher
- Product designer
- Two full stack engineers
- QA engineer
- Delivery lead
Credits
D&C Studios contributed the research, programme validation, product strategy and the learner system described on this page. Course videos and instructional materials were produced by a media partner. The wider GoDaddy Academy initiative was led by GoDaddy India and involved its own stakeholders and other contributors. Learner and referral figures come from the platform’s first year reporting.
Stack and tools
- Laravel
- MySQL
- Vue.js
- Queued PDF certificate service
- Transactional email