Setting a New Standard for Digital Education in Italy

The Challenge

Multiversity’s LMS sits at the heart of online higher education in Italy. It supports more than 200,000 students enrolled across 70+ degree programmes and 300 postgraduate courses, delivered through three of the country’s leading online universities: Università Telematica Pegaso, Università San Raffaele Roma, and Università Mercatorum. The platform’s flexible, fully-online model is what makes it possible for working professionals, parents, and mature learners to pursue degrees they otherwise couldn’t.

But the bar set by everyday consumer technology had moved. Italian users now expect the same effortless, personalised experience from their LMS that they get from streaming, banking, and shopping apps. Multiversity’s platform was functionally robust and feature-rich, but it was beginning to show its age. Fragmented content, low visibility of key features, inconsistent feedback, and limited personalisation were creating friction at exactly the moments students needed support. Meanwhile, regulatory shifts, a move to 20% live lessons with mandatory attendance, and competitive pressure from a growing field of digital-first learning platforms meant the gap could only widen.

The question wasn’t whether the LMS needed to evolve. It was where to focus first, and how to build a platform that didn’t just function, but actively motivated students to keep going.

Our approach

Over five weeks, Red Badger ran a structured, evidence-led assessment designed to surface both immediate friction and long-term opportunity. The team combined direct student insight with expert input and external benchmarking to build a 360-degree view of the platform.

In practice, that meant qualitative interviews with current Multiversity students, conducted in Italian and centred on real study behaviours, pain points, and unmet needs. It meant expert interviews with Multiversity’s UX/UI, content production, and customer service teams, surfacing operational realities the user research alone couldn’t reach.

The team analysed 30,000 customer contact logs to validate where friction was actually showing up, and ran a heuristic evaluation across the platform’s core user journeys, global elements, and design system, assessed against ten established UX principles and three experience lenses (Utility, Usability, Desirability).

To stretch beyond functional parity, the team benchmarked 19 leading digital platforms, including LMS players like Coursera, Udemy, Canvas, and Khan Academy, alongside high-engagement consumer products like Duolingo, Spotify, Headspace, and Peloton. The goal wasn’t to compare feature lists, it was to understand what motivates modern learners, and how the best products in any category build long-term engagement.

Layered on top of all of this was a regulatory and accessibility review, including audits for GDPR exposure and WCAG AA compliance.

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