Preface: I'm an interface designer with a background in human-computer interaction. I come from a family of teachers, so the processes of learning and teaching lessons is nothing new to me.
The OP isn't wrong. This design has some major flaws, especially considering it's launch point for academic lessons. This design tries to provide many affordances through a simple layout and language, which unfortunately is one of it's core weaknesses.
As a designer, I fully support providing users with affordances to help guide them through the navigation and (initial) experiences they have with a product. The design of user affordances can be very hard to scale in covering a swath of new experiences, specifically those for learning and teaching new lessons (languages, projects, etc). This is especially true in Codecademy's case. With teaching and learning a lesson, it's a journey of an experience with a story or narrative that we all generally share/follow. Knowing this and from experience the design of a learning and teaching experience is one that should be guided through the means of using clean and intuitive interactions, layouts, straightforward language, limited and specific color choices, clear and understandable iconography and most important the display of relevant and necessary information.
The design of this page unfortunately doesn't follow much of what I've generally just stated. It lacks focus partially due to the language, the use of 5+ colors, general layout, ambiguous iconography, and the lack of sensibly presented information hierarchy and relevancy. You don't know which container to start with, and whether or not the content in one is relevant or has an impact on the other. It all starts with the left container and the yellow box stating 'Start Here!->'. If you start there and try to follow along you can either end up in the right column or continue further down the left column. This is where the navigation and understanding of this page falls apart.
Path of the Right Container:
If you go to the right container you are presented with a list of projects and lessons that can filtered in two different ways: Above the list is filtering by language/platform/all and to the immediate right of the list is filtering by lessons/games/misc/all as well as a search field. There too much filtering and currently unnecessary search field for a contained design and growing list of courses (currently at a total of 24). Better inline segmented of of the list (i.e. segment games from courses from misc as opposed to random ordering). There are plenty of other issues but let's continue on.
Path of the left container:
Continuing down the path of the left container your asked the only question of the page "Hello! What can we help you build?" Ideally I'd imagine this relates to a user finding and picking a project game or lesson in the right container. But, immediately below the question there is an instructional statement to 'Pick a track to start learning" where a user can select one of two answers 'Applications' or 'Websites'. If a user then clicks one they are taken away to a different page with out any feed forward affordance via language or visual queue at all. This makes you question what's the point of the right container with all those options if I'm going to be taken to a different page. Continuing on, just below these 'track' options is another section titled 'Up Next', which contains a course title and button to 'Continue course' that I've partially completed. Because it's titled 'Up Next' its misleading and now seems arbitrarily placed on the page with no connection to the content above or in the right container.
General conclusion:
Between the issues with language, layout, information hierarchy, relevancy and more, it seems like this design wasn't fully thought through or tested enough. As a designer who cares, this is troubling for a site offering an academic service with potential to charge its users. Even more so because I hope these same issues don't care over to other pages.
Pinna is powered by PlayerKit. PlayerKit is a small new open-source playback engine for audio we've created. Check it out on github at https://github.com/decarbonization/PlayerKit
After recently working with Microsoft on a project for 8 months all I can say is the way their product team offices are set up is quite bad. The user experience designers and visual designers are sitting hallways down from the developers and program managers. This is not how it should be. All stakeholders in the application design process should be near each other. Open work spaces do wonders for communication and collaboration, which in turn affects product design.
The OP isn't wrong. This design has some major flaws, especially considering it's launch point for academic lessons. This design tries to provide many affordances through a simple layout and language, which unfortunately is one of it's core weaknesses.
As a designer, I fully support providing users with affordances to help guide them through the navigation and (initial) experiences they have with a product. The design of user affordances can be very hard to scale in covering a swath of new experiences, specifically those for learning and teaching new lessons (languages, projects, etc). This is especially true in Codecademy's case. With teaching and learning a lesson, it's a journey of an experience with a story or narrative that we all generally share/follow. Knowing this and from experience the design of a learning and teaching experience is one that should be guided through the means of using clean and intuitive interactions, layouts, straightforward language, limited and specific color choices, clear and understandable iconography and most important the display of relevant and necessary information.
The design of this page unfortunately doesn't follow much of what I've generally just stated. It lacks focus partially due to the language, the use of 5+ colors, general layout, ambiguous iconography, and the lack of sensibly presented information hierarchy and relevancy. You don't know which container to start with, and whether or not the content in one is relevant or has an impact on the other. It all starts with the left container and the yellow box stating 'Start Here!->'. If you start there and try to follow along you can either end up in the right column or continue further down the left column. This is where the navigation and understanding of this page falls apart.
Path of the Right Container:
If you go to the right container you are presented with a list of projects and lessons that can filtered in two different ways: Above the list is filtering by language/platform/all and to the immediate right of the list is filtering by lessons/games/misc/all as well as a search field. There too much filtering and currently unnecessary search field for a contained design and growing list of courses (currently at a total of 24). Better inline segmented of of the list (i.e. segment games from courses from misc as opposed to random ordering). There are plenty of other issues but let's continue on.
Path of the left container:
Continuing down the path of the left container your asked the only question of the page "Hello! What can we help you build?" Ideally I'd imagine this relates to a user finding and picking a project game or lesson in the right container. But, immediately below the question there is an instructional statement to 'Pick a track to start learning" where a user can select one of two answers 'Applications' or 'Websites'. If a user then clicks one they are taken away to a different page with out any feed forward affordance via language or visual queue at all. This makes you question what's the point of the right container with all those options if I'm going to be taken to a different page. Continuing on, just below these 'track' options is another section titled 'Up Next', which contains a course title and button to 'Continue course' that I've partially completed. Because it's titled 'Up Next' its misleading and now seems arbitrarily placed on the page with no connection to the content above or in the right container.
General conclusion:
Between the issues with language, layout, information hierarchy, relevancy and more, it seems like this design wasn't fully thought through or tested enough. As a designer who cares, this is troubling for a site offering an academic service with potential to charge its users. Even more so because I hope these same issues don't care over to other pages.