A diamond in the rough
TL;DR: I quite like the platform and what it offers, but it is in dire need of some polish to really make it shine. The platform itself is worth 5 stars, but -1 star for bad security practice (emailing passwords in plain text) and -1 star for a messy UI. I purchased an AppSumo LTD code to play around with Gurucan. It comes with a ton of useful features and has the makings of a fully-fledged, all-in-one LMS. My one major gripe is that the platform seems to have been designed by software engineers with very little UX knowledge. I wouldn't go so far as to call the user interface "unintuitive", but it does feel rather cluttered and messy because of all the inconsistencies in the UI. For example: 1. Under Admin panel > Online school settings > General, there is zero spacing between the "General Settings", "Online school name", and "Description". 2. Under Admin panel > Marketing > Push-notifications, there is a strange space placed in front of " Send only to course users:". 3. In the web-platform "articles" are sometimes referred to as "blogs" and vice versa. Please decide on a single, unified name to address that functionality. 4. In the web-platform, the button to call up a window for filtering article categories is also placed in a strange spot in the navigation bar. Please ditch the button and place the window immediately above the article list for easy access. 5. The burger menu button used to toggle the left navigation bar is placed in different positions on the admin panel and the web platform. Again, please make it consistent. And don't just rotate the burger icon when you close the menu, because it conveys absolutely no meaning and will simply confuse a new student/user. Please stick to standard design conventions and display a burger menu icon when the navigation is closed and an "X" icon when the navigation is open. Small inconsistencies/inconveniences like this will make the UI feel janky and unprofessional. These are not major issues, but it WILL turn users (like me!) away from your platform. My suggestion is to add more negative space in the form of margins and paddings. And please make sure that the spacing between different elements are kept consistent. I would also love it if you can add some spacing to the left of each page in the admin panel so it is spaced further away from the navigation panel on the left. Gurucan also email passwords to their user in plain text. This is just bad practice. You should only send out a link for the user to set/reset their password. Fortunately, the pros of the platform outweigh the cons. It has virtually everything you need to create and sell courses. The webinar features and mobile apps are just icing on the cake. And if the developers stay true to their LTD promise, you get unlimited bandwidth for $9 a month. This is crazy affordable compared to most other LMS platforms out there, who will easily ask for 10x the price. You also get +10k emails for $8 a month, but it's not really necessary if you are only sending welcome emails. In terms of feature requests, a. I would like be able to edit the footer on the web platform. A single "Need help?" link pointing to the course creator's email address is simply not enough. I would like the option to add links to social media accounts, custom articles including legal pages (privacy policy, disclaimers, terms of use, etc) and FAQ pages, as well as email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and custom HTML for embedding external code. b. I would like to see a keyword search feature for articles. c. You can't really call yourself an all-in-one platform without a community forum. The chat functionality is good for shorter-lived webinars, but it is not robust enough to hold long-standing group discussion on different topics. d. While we're at it, a commenting feature (similar to Wordpress blog comments) underneath each lesson can also work wonders to facilitate discussion. Students can use it to voice their opinions or ask questions immediately after watching each lesson.
By Yang Heng K.