The Coloring Channel: a learning platform that cut operational time by 80%
About The Coloring Channel
The Coloring Channel is a creative learning platform for members who want to learn colouring through tutorials, structured lessons and hands-on projects. Its community has grown to 40,000+ members.
Overview
The goal was to turn a manual membership experience into a connected digital journey. Learners needed to discover what to learn, know where to start, stay motivated and progress at their own pace, while the team needed membership to be easier to manage. The challenge was not putting lessons online but designing the experience around them.
Role
Product Designer. I covered research, the brand in the interface, the website & web app, the member experience and the content system.
Team
Product Designer (Me), (1) Product Manager, Founder, (2) SDEs
Outcomes
80%
less operational time
60%
higher platform adoption
10X
greater audience reach.
The Problem
The constraint was scale: tutorials, access and payments for a 40,000+ member community were managed by hand, and the team had two months to turn that into a product
Before the platform existed, tutorial videos were emailed to members one by one after their access was confirmed. Membership and payment details needed manual coordination too. As the audience grew, keeping track of who had access to what became harder to sustain
Moving videos from email to a website would not have solved it. Three problems sat underneath:
1. Manual management. Memberships, content and access depended on people doing repetitive work, which could not scale with the community
2. An uneven learning journey. Members ranged from new colourists to experienced ones, and many were not highly comfortable with technology. Finding a lesson or knowing what to do next could stop them before they started.
3. Drop-off. The team had observed learners leaving before completing lessons, so the experience also had to give people reasons to continue.
The design question became: how could a digital platform help learners discover what to learn, know where to begin, pick up where they left off, and want to return, while taking repetitive work off the team?
A manual, person-by-person process becomes one connected platform
Before, every step depended on someone on the team. Now members move through one journey and the team publishes from one system.
Research and insights
Research showed that this was less a content-hosting problem than a journey problem, shaped by an audience with mixed digital confidence and a library that would keep growing.
I worked from four inputs:
Stakeholder discussions to understand the business, the manual processes, and the goals for the growing community.
Audience understanding of members' digital confidence, colouring experience, motivations and learning behaviour.
Platform research. I studied Drumeo for creative learning journeys, discovery, progression and engagement. Netflix and Behance showed how large content libraries are organised and surfaced.
Journey mapping from first entry through continued learning, to find where friction, uncertainty and drop-off appeared.
What I found, and what it changed in the design:
Key design decisions
Five decisions shaped the product, each a choice between a more obvious route and one that fit how creative learners behave.
1. Guide the start, but do not prescribe the path
I chose clear entry points and open exploration over a single predefined curriculum. A new colourist may want the basics, an experienced one may want a specific technique, and someone else may only want inspiration. A fixed path would suit only one of them. This follows the idea of choice and autonomy in learning design.
2. Let people explore before they commit
I chose free resources and guided onboarding ahead of sign-up, rather than asking for commitment first. For many members a first visit felt like a significant step, so seeing the value had to come before the decision to join.
3. Organise the library around how learners look for lessons
I chose a structure of topics, techniques and projects with filtering, rather than a flat catalogue. With hundreds of lessons, the problem was making the relationships between lessons understandable, so someone looking for one technique would not have to browse everything else.
4. Keep motivation light
I chose small encouragement moments (rewards, progress, playful characters, recommendations) over a heavy system of badges, notifications and reminders. The goal was reasons to keep learning and creating, not time spent in the app, and the experience should not feel distracting or overly gamified.
5. Treat membership as flexible, not subscribe or cancel
I chose pause, upgrade and downgrade controls with clear billing information, powered by Stripe, over a model where changing needs meant cancelling and starting again. Interests and availability change, and the product should change with them.
What I found, and what it changed in the design:
The solution
The platform connects discovery, learning, motivation and membership into one journey, so a lesson becomes a starting point for what comes next rather than an end point.
Each step leads to the next, so a lesson becomes a starting point
Highlighted: continuity, the step that turns a lesson into a journey
Read the loop clockwise: a learner finds something, begins, learns, steps away, returns to where they left off, sees progress, and finds the next lesson.
A website that lets people see the value first
The website is the first digital touchpoint for prospective members. It helps them understand the platform, explore the learning experience and see the value of joining before they commit, with free resources and guided onboarding to lower the barrier.
Lessons that are easier to find
A structured learning and filtering system makes hundreds of lessons easier to browse. Members can see the available topics and techniques at a glance and use clear signals to pick lessons that match their current needs.
A way back into learning
Creative learning happens across several sessions: starting a project, practising, returning later. The experience brings unfinished learning back into view so members do not have to search for something they had already started.
Motivation that supports the reason people came
Rewards acknowledge achievements, progress shows movement, characters add personality and recommendations encourage exploration. These moments reinforce the satisfaction of learning something new rather than pulling attention away from the lesson.
A membership members can adapt
Members can manage subscription controls, pause their plan, upgrade or downgrade between plans, and understand billing, all through Stripe, without having to cancel and start again.
A brand that stays recognisable
The platform needed structure without feeling rigid. Typography, colour, illustration, characters, rewards and components carry The Coloring Channel's creative personality, so the product feels welcoming enough to explore and structured enough to learn from.
A system that replaces manual management
Behind the scenes, a flexible content system makes it easier to create, organise and publish lessons. The growing community gets the same experience without the team adding manual effort.
Designing for scale
The platform had to grow with the community inside real limits: two months, a team of five, learners with mixed digital confidence, and a library of rich artwork and long-form lessons that could not slow the experience down.
Constraints
Collaboration and build
I worked with the product manager and the founder on goals and priorities, and with the two SDEs on how the experience would be built. The platform runs on Next.js for the frontend and backend, with AWS RDS, S3 and a CDN supporting services and content delivery. Stripe powers membership changes.
Validation before launch
Manual and performance testing validated the critical flows, identified system thresholds and checked the experience across devices and content. The platform launched stable.
In summary, I made learning easier by creating clear entry points, structured content, and intuitive filters to help learners find what they need, adding progress tracking and rewards to keep them motivated, and building a scalable content system and cloud architecture to support community growth with less manual effort.
Impact
The team stopped being the bottleneck.
Before, every new member meant another round of manual confirmations and emails. After launch, the platform handled access, content and memberships on its own, so the team could spend its time on what the business exists to do: teaching colouring.
In summary, I made learning easier by creating clear entry points, structured content, and intuitive filters to help learners find what they need, adding progress tracking and rewards to keep them motivated, and building a scalable content system and cloud architecture to support community growth with less manual effort.
Reflection
The project taught me that structure and freedom are not opposites: learners need enough structure to understand their options, and enough freedom to follow their own interests.
What I learned
Design around the content, not only inside it. What a learner needs before, during and after a lesson shaped the product more than the lesson player did.
Continuity matters. A product should remember enough of a learner's journey to help them continue.
Engagement works best when it supports why people came: to learn, practise and create.
What I would do differently
Set baselines before launch for completion, return visits and time spent on manual tasks, so each result traces directly to a design decision.
Test the first-visit and discovery flows earlier with the members least comfortable with technology, since they set the bar for the whole experience.
Review how recommendations and rewards affect lesson completion over time, and adjust the balance between encouragement and distraction.
The Coloring Channel: a learning platform that cut operational time by 80%
About The Coloring Channel
The Coloring Channel is a creative learning platform for members who want to learn colouring through tutorials, structured lessons and hands-on projects. Its community has grown to 40,000+ members.
Overview
The goal was to turn a manual membership experience into a connected digital journey. Learners needed to discover what to learn, know where to start, stay motivated and progress at their own pace, while the team needed membership to be easier to manage. The challenge was not putting lessons online but designing the experience around them.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Product Designer (Me), (1) Product Manager, Founder, (2) SDEs
Outcomes
80%
less operational time
60%
higher platform adoption
10X
greater audience reach.
The Problem
The constraint was scale: tutorials, access and payments for a 40,000+ member community were managed by hand, and the team had two months to turn that into a product
Before the platform existed, tutorial videos were emailed to members one by one after their access was confirmed. Membership and payment details needed manual coordination too. As the audience grew, keeping track of who had access to what became harder to sustain
Moving videos from email to a website would not have solved it. Three problems sat underneath:
1. Manual management. Memberships, content and access depended on people doing repetitive work, which could not scale with the community
2. An uneven learning journey. Members ranged from new colourists to experienced ones, and many were not highly comfortable with technology. Finding a lesson or knowing what to do next could stop them before they started.
3. Drop-off. The team had observed learners leaving before completing lessons, so the experience also had to give people reasons to continue.
The design question became: how could a digital platform help learners discover what to learn, know where to begin, pick up where they left off, and want to return, while taking repetitive work off the team?
A manual, person-by-person process becomes one connected platform
Before, every step depended on someone on the team. Now members move through one journey and the team publishes from one system.
Research and insights
Research showed that this was less a content-hosting problem than a journey problem, shaped by an audience with mixed digital confidence and a library that would keep growing.
I worked from four inputs:
•
Stakeholder discussions to understand the business, the manual processes, and the goals for the growing community.
•
Audience understanding of members' digital confidence, colouring experience, motivations and learning behaviour.
•
Platform research. I studied Drumeo for creative learning journeys, discovery, progression and engagement. Netflix and Behance showed how large content libraries are organised and surfaced.
•
Journey mapping from first entry through continued learning, to find where friction, uncertainty and drop-off appeared.
What I found, and what it changed in the design:
Many learners were not comfortable with technology
A simple first step, clear navigation and guided discovery points
Some learners dropped off before finishing lessons
Continuity: an easy way back to an unfinished lesson, plus light progress cues
Creative learning is not linear: people explore, pause and return
Clear entry points without a fixed path
Hundreds of lessons make choosing hard
A structure of topics, techniques and filters so relationships between lessons are visible
Members’ needs and availability change over time
Membership controls that avoid a cancel-and-restart choice
Content, access and billing relied on manual work
A system to create, organise and publish content that scales without extra manual effort
Key design decisions
Five decisions shaped the product, each a choice between a more obvious route and one that fit how creative learners behave.
1. Guide the start, but do not prescribe the path
I chose clear entry points and open exploration over a single predefined curriculum. A new colourist may want the basics, an experienced one may want a specific technique, and someone else may only want inspiration. A fixed path would suit only one of them. This follows the idea of choice and autonomy in learning design.
2. Let people explore before they commit
I chose free resources and guided onboarding ahead of sign-up, rather than asking for commitment first. For many members a first visit felt like a significant step, so seeing the value had to come before the decision to join.
3. Organise the library around how learners look for lessons
I chose a structure of topics, techniques and projects with filtering, rather than a flat catalogue. With hundreds of lessons, the problem was making the relationships between lessons understandable, so someone looking for one technique would not have to browse everything else.
4. Keep motivation light
I chose small encouragement moments (rewards, progress, playful characters, recommendations) over a heavy system of badges, notifications and reminders. The goal was reasons to keep learning and creating, not time spent in the app, and the experience should not feel distracting or overly gamified.
5. Treat membership as flexible, not subscribe or cancel
I chose pause, upgrade and downgrade controls with clear billing information, powered by Stripe, over a model where changing needs meant cancelling and starting again. Interests and availability change, and the product should change with them.
What I found, and what it changed in the design:
Many learners were not comfortable with technology
A simple first step, clear navigation and guided discovery points
Some learners dropped off before finishing lessons
Continuity: an easy way back to an unfinished lesson, plus light progress cues
Creative learning is not linear: people explore, pause and return
Clear entry points without a fixed path
Hundreds of lessons make choosing hard
A structure of topics, techniques and filters so relationships between lessons are visible
Members’ needs and availability change over time
Membership controls that avoid a cancel-and-restart choice
Content, access and billing relied on manual work
A system to create, organise and publish content that scales without extra manual effort
The solution
The platform connects discovery, learning, motivation and membership into one journey, so a lesson becomes a starting point for what comes next rather than an end point.
Each step leads to the next, so a lesson becomes a starting point
Highlighted: continuity, the step that turns a lesson into a journey
Read the loop clockwise: a learner finds something, begins, learns, steps away, returns to where they left off, sees progress, and finds the next lesson.
A website that lets people see the value first
The website is the first digital touchpoint for prospective members. It helps them understand the platform, explore the learning experience and see the value of joining before they commit, with free resources and guided onboarding to lower the barrier.
Lessons that are easier to find
A structured learning and filtering system makes hundreds of lessons easier to browse. Members can see the available topics and techniques at a glance and use clear signals to pick lessons that match their current needs.
A way back into learning
Creative learning happens across several sessions: starting a project, practising, returning later. The experience brings unfinished learning back into view so members do not have to search for something they had already started.
Motivation that supports the reason people came
Rewards acknowledge achievements, progress shows movement, characters add personality and recommendations encourage exploration. These moments reinforce the satisfaction of learning something new rather than pulling attention away from the lesson.
A membership members can adapt
Members can manage subscription controls, pause their plan, upgrade or downgrade between plans, and understand billing, all through Stripe, without having to cancel and start again.
A brand that stays recognisable
The platform needed structure without feeling rigid. Typography, colour, illustration, characters, rewards and components carry The Coloring Channel's creative personality, so the product feels welcoming enough to explore and structured enough to learn from.
A system that replaces manual management
Behind the scenes, a flexible content system makes it easier to create, organise and publish lessons. The growing community gets the same experience without the team adding manual effort.
Designing for scale
The platform had to grow with the community inside real limits: two months, a team of five, learners with mixed digital confidence, and a library of rich artwork and long-form lessons that could not slow the experience down.
Constraints
Mixed digital confidence
Clear navigation, guided discovery points and a simple first step
Large and growing content library
Filtering and structure that scale with the catalogue
Rich artwork and long-form content
A frontend and infrastructure built to keep performance steady
Playful brand, serious functionality
A visual language that stays friendly while keeping the interface clear
Collaboration and build
I worked with the product manager and the founder on goals and priorities, and with the two SDEs on how the experience would be built. The platform runs on Next.js for the frontend and backend, with AWS RDS, S3 and a CDN supporting services and content delivery. Stripe powers membership changes.
Validation before launch
Manual and performance testing validated the critical flows, identified system thresholds and checked the experience across devices and content. The platform launched stable.
In summary, I made learning easier by creating clear entry points, structured content, and intuitive filters to help learners find what they need, adding progress tracking and rewards to keep them motivated, and building a scalable content system and cloud architecture to support community growth with less manual effort.
Impact
The team stopped being the bottleneck.
Before, every new member meant another round of manual confirmations and emails. After launch, the platform handled access, content and memberships on its own, so the team could spend its time on what the business exists to do: teaching colouring.
Operational time
80% reduction
A structured system replaced manual handling of members, access and learning tasks
Audience reach
10X greater
A scalable digital experience that engages a wider audience without matching manual effort
Platform adoption
60% increase
A more accessible entry experience, free resources and streamlined onboarding
Member engagement
40% increase
Guided learning, recommendations, rewards and personalised moments that bring members back
In summary, I made learning easier by creating clear entry points, structured content, and intuitive filters to help learners find what they need, adding progress tracking and rewards to keep them motivated, and building a scalable content system and cloud architecture to support community growth with less manual effort.
Reflection
The project taught me that structure and freedom are not opposites: learners need enough structure to understand their options, and enough freedom to follow their own interests.
What I learned
•
Design around the content, not only inside it. What a learner needs before, during and after a lesson shaped the product more than the lesson player did.
•
Continuity matters. A product should remember enough of a learner's journey to help them continue.
•
Engagement works best when it supports why people came: to learn, practise and create.
What I would do differently
•
Set baselines before launch for completion, return visits and time spent on manual tasks, so each result traces directly to a design decision.
•
Test the first-visit and discovery flows earlier with the members least comfortable with technology, since they set the bar for the whole experience.
•
Review how recommendations and rewards affect lesson completion over time, and adjust the balance between encouragement and distraction.