Case Study: The Moody’s Analytics Course Catalog

Case Study:

The Moody’s
Analytics Course Catalog

One of my primary responsibilities at Moody’s Analytics was to analyze their Learning Solutions course catalog, identify pain points and implement A/B testing with the goal of implementing improvements that increased the catalog’s performance based on our defined KPIs.

Below you will find the iterations I moved through as time passed and I continued to gather information and improve the experience. Ultimately I managed to increase the conversion rate by 38% on an annual basis.

Phase One
Phase Two
Phase Three
Phase Four

Use these buttons to explore the journey of this catalog from beginning to end.

Phase One – Analysis of the Legacy Catalog

An image of the cluttered, overwhelming course catalog as it was in 2019

Catalog Analysis


  • A Comprehensive Listing – users looking for Public Courses can find them all in a single place.
  • Categorization – it is easy for a potential student to find the Category which probably houses their course.
  • Strong CTA – if the primary goal of the page was to have would-be students contact Moody’s, the “Request More Information” CTA is obvious and clear.

Phase Two – The First Solution

Phase Three : the Second Solution – Improvements

Phase Four: The Final Iteration

animated card flip

Summary

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Most visitors came to the course catalog page with two primary goals: either to find and register for a course, or to reach out to someone for more information or help. The challenge was always the same: how do we give them everything they need without flooding them with too much, or starving them with too little?

To answer this, we had to consider what users were really looking for, how we could define their journey to conversion, and how we could design the page so that it took the weight off the sales department. Instead of requiring prospective students to call, the page itself needed to supply enough detail to let them register directly.

Pain Points Identified

  • Students only had a general idea (e.g., Commercial Banking) but not the specific course.
  • A simple list of titles was useless — clicking through individually was overwhelming.
  • Analytics showed low click-through, high bounce, and wandering behavior.
  • Sales was overburdened fielding basic course-clarification calls.
  • Students consistently asked for six key details: segment, channel, budget, certification path, duration, and summary.

Solutions Implemented

  • Introduced card-based course design: image, segment/channel, title, and banners upfront.
  • Card flip on hover revealed duration, summary, price, and clear CTAs (register or request info).
  • Added filters and sorting: by segment, channel, price, or alphabetically.
  • Used visuals and structured information to reduce cognitive load.
  • Created a self-service catalog that answered questions before sales ever got involved.

Results

  • Dramatic drop in bounce rates.
  • Significant reduction in calls to sales.
  • Increased scroll depth and click-through.
  • Achieved a 38% conversion rate.

Sales teams discovered, through direct conversations with prospective students, that many visitors had a general idea of what they needed, but not a specific course in mind. This meant that presenting just a lis of course titles was useless. Expecting a student to click through to each title individually in order to discover what the course was about was unreasonable and frustrating.

Analytics and heat maps confirmed this: click-through rates were very low, bounce rates were severely high, and users wandered around the page without clear direction. The lack of structure left students with uncertainty, and the sales department with an overwhelming number of calls from confused leads.

By combining data analysis with stakeholder and student feedback, we identified several key pieces of information that prospective students required in order to make confident decisions:

  • Segment (Category) – While they might not know the exact course, nearly all students knew the broad category they needed (for example, Commercial Banking versus ESG and Climate).
  • Channel – Students definitively knew whether they wanted an instructor-led or self-paced elearning course.
  • Budget – Students wanted to know the price of the course.
  • Certification Path – Many students were working towards a certification – knowing which courses fit into a certain path was helpful.
  • Duration – Students often queried how long the course would take to complete.
  • Summary – In order to be sure this is the course they are looking for, almost all students wanted a basic summary before clicking through to registration.

This is a lot of information to provide and to consume. The biggest challenge after analyzing each progressive iteration of the catalog was to find a way to present all the requested information in an easy-to-consume manner that avoids information overload and fatigue.

The solution was to present the courses as cards, with only a small amount of visible information:

  1. An image – we found the “break” provided by images reduced the cognitive load and created a more enjoyable experience.
  2. Segment – virtual classroom (instructor-led), Self-Paced Online (eLearning), or a combination of both (Blended).
  3. Course Title.
  4. A banner designed to pique interest, such as “New” or “Popular” – this banner also designated Certification-pathed courses.

On hover, each course card would individually flip to present the visitor the rest of the information – now siloed in such a way as to feel less overwhelming:

  1. The Title.
  2. Duration.
  3. Course Summary.
  4. Cost.
  5. The two conversion paths:
    • A. Take the user to the course detail page where they can see all of the course dates and register.
    • B. Button to request information which pre-populates the form for ease of completion.

This solution presented the visitors with three simple means to consolidate and re-organize the information:

  1. Segment – view only the courses within a specific category.
  2. Channel – remove any courses that are not offered in the means the visitor wants to consume.
  3. Sorting – organize the courses alphabetically or by price.

With all of these improvements, we saw a dramatic decrease in bounce rates and calls to the sales team, an impressive increase in scroll depth and click-through rate, and a whopping 38% conversion rate.