The V&A Academy is the renowned educational arm of the Victoria and Albert Museum, dedicated to providing cultural education in art, design, and history. The Academy’s courses are integral to the museum’s mission, offering premium learning experiences to a diverse, global audience, many of whom are loyal V&A members.

The challenge: a platform worthy of the V&A brand

Facing ambitious targets for improving learner retention and increasing revenue, the V&A Academy knew their existing infrastructure, a combination of Microsoft Teams and an unintegrated pilot platform, was not sustainable or scalable.

The core challenge was two-fold: to find a digital learning platform that not only accommodated a variety of learning formats (live lectures, on-demand content, hybrid courses) but also perfectly matched the museum’s world-class design standards. The platform needed to deliver a “premium, joyful experience,” reflecting the quality and aesthetic excellence of a V&A exhibition, while simultaneously satisfying complex enterprise requirements like seamless Single Sign-On (SSO), CRM integration, strict GDPR compliance, and WCAG accessibility standards.

The Unthinkable approach: user-centric discovery

In summer 2025, Unthinkable was commissioned to lead a rigorous, evidence-based selection process. Our five-phase project ensured every decision was anchored in user needs and organisational strategy:

Deep Discovery: We conducted extensive interviews with over 24 stakeholders, including learners, educators, and internal V&A teams (Technology, Digital, Commercial). This culminated in defining detailed “Jobs to be Done” for each user type.
Strategic Dimensions: We synthesised these needs into six core Platform Selection Dimensions—such as "Simple, Inclusive, Joyful, Premium Learning Experience" and "Low-Code Enterprise Ecosystem Integration."
Market Mapping: We evaluated a longlist of platforms against these dimensions and the V&A's detailed Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). This process quickly ruled out generic solutions that compromised on either premium learner experience or enterprise compliance.

At the end of this phase, we ran a face to face workshop with key stakeholders from across the organisation to review the evidence and analysis so far and provide a place to play in all-important strategic considerations. Following this, we moved on to our final two phases:
Prototyping & Testing: We took the final two leading candidates and supported the V&A team to build prototype courses on each. This allowed V&A staff and actual learners to test the front-end and back-end experience in a real-world context.
Final Recommendation: We delivered a comprehensive final report that quantified the fit of the platforms against both the strategic dimensions and the non-negotiable NFRs.

A blueprint for responsible and effective use of AI

Working with Claude as the equivalent of a fourth member of our team enabled us to go into much greater depth and detail than might otherwise have been possible within the project budget and timeline. We learned a lot in the process about how to forge effective collaborations between human team members and AI. Some principles which we established in this project which we feel will be important to carry over in the future included:

Always ensuring transparency in attribution of project outputs to AI where relevant.
Retaining human decision-making gates at every point: we delegated research and analysis, but we never delegated judgement.
Careful review of all AI outputs for relevance, accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Additional human research and communications to follow up on due diligence around candidate platforms.

The impact

Unthinkable provided the V&A Academy with a clear, data-driven path forward. By focusing equally on learner experience and enterprise compliance, we empowered the V&A team to make a platform decision based on a thorough understanding of scalability, compliance and brand alignment, setting the stage for significant revenue growth and a truly world-class digital learning future.

Unthinkable just… got it. We came to them with a complicated brief, asking them to thread the needle between lots of competing internal and external stakeholder priorities, and they did an outstanding job. They struck the perfect balance between listening and pushing: listening to what we needed, while pushing us on our woollier thinking. In the end, the report, excellent as it was, wasn’t the key deliverable; it was the way Unthinkable had quietly sharpened our thought processes. Value for life! Thank you so much, folks!

Ian Ellard, Head of V&A Academy