PRoject
Happy Budtenders, originally ZolTrain, was a mobile-first learning platform designed to help cannabis brands and retailers educate budtenders at scale. Brands could replace repetitive in-person training with interactive digital courses, while retailers could monitor employee participation, course completion, quiz scores, and progress across locations.
My role spanned nearly every part of the experience—from designing the educational courses themselves to shaping the platform, brand system, sales materials, onboarding guides, and campaigns that supported them.
This accurately reflects the platform’s combination of mobile education, employee tracking, standardized training, analytics, and incentives.
Challenge
Cannabis brands often relied on sales representatives to visit dispensaries and repeatedly explain complex product portfolios to constantly changing retail teams. The process was expensive, inconsistent, difficult to scale, and gave brands little insight into whether employees retained the information.
Happy Budtenders turned that challenge into a mobile learning experience. Budtenders could complete short, visually engaging courses on their phones, test their knowledge, and earn rewards. Meanwhile, brands and retailers could deliver consistent education, monitor participation, and understand performance across products, employees, and locations.
The CannaCraft case study is particularly useful proof: its previous training process depended on in-person demonstrations, physical incentives, and paper surveys, while the platform created a centralized and measurable digital alternative.
Designing Education People Wanted to Complete
The platform served three distinct audiences, each with different needs. Budtenders needed an effortless way to discover courses, learn on their phones, complete quizzes, and earn incentives. Retailers needed visibility into employee progress and training performance. Brands needed a scalable way to publish education, manage content, and understand engagement.
I helped shape the interface and visual system across these connected experiences, designing reusable components, course cards, layouts, navigation patterns, and branded states that created greater consistency throughout the platform.
The platform maps show distinct brand, administrator, and budtender experiences, including course management, analytics, employee progress, playlists, rewards, and integrations.
One Platform, Three Different Users
The platform served three distinct audiences, each with different needs. Budtenders needed an effortless way to discover courses, learn on their phones, complete quizzes, and earn incentives. Retailers needed visibility into employee progress and training performance. Brands needed a scalable way to publish education, manage content, and understand engagement.
I helped shape the interface and visual system across these connected experiences, designing reusable components, course cards, layouts, navigation patterns, and branded states that created greater consistency throughout the platform.
The platform maps show distinct brand, administrator, and budtender experiences, including course management, analytics, employee progress, playlists, rewards, and integrations.
Making a Complex Platform Easy to Use
Because brands and retailers could create and manage their own training, the platform needed documentation that was as intuitive as the product itself. I designed detailed course-editor guides, content-card instructions, retailer resources, and presentation decks that translated a complex set of tools into clear, approachable steps.
These materials explained everything from building and publishing a course to managing playlists, quizzes, employee progress, analytics, and rewards. Although the tools empowered clients to create their own education, I continued to design many of the finished courses to ensure the experience remained polished and effective.
Evolving ZolTrain Into Happy Budtenders
When ZolTrain evolved into Happy Budtenders, the change had to extend far beyond a new logo. I helped translate the new identity throughout the digital product, establishing component styles, card systems, layouts, presentation materials, educational resources, and branded touchpoints across the experience.
The challenge was creating a cohesive platform while still allowing every cannabis brand to retain its own personality. The resulting system gave Happy Budtenders a recognizable identity without overpowering the highly customized course content at the center of the product.
Designing the Experience
Building on the new brand identity, I designed a responsive website that unified Codence's products and consulting services into a single experience. Clear information architecture, thoughtful content hierarchy, and intuitive interactions guided users toward the actions most important to the business.
Interactive prototypes gave stakeholders an opportunity to test navigation, responsive layouts, and key interactions early, streamlining reviews and creating a smoother transition into development.
Collaboration & Execution
I partnered closely with developers throughout implementation, providing responsive specifications, interaction guidance, and detailed design documentation to ensure the final build remained true to the design vision.
After development, I led multiple rounds of quality assurance across devices and breakpoints, refining the experience before launch to ensure consistency and usability across the entire site.
The website launched in 2019, and many of the core design principles established during the redesign continue to shape Codence's online presence today.
Project Highlights
Designed one of the platform's largest libraries of interactive cannabis education.
Reimagined traditional slide-based training as engaging mobile-first learning experiences.
Helped translate the Happy Budtenders rebrand into a cohesive product experience and design system.
Created reusable UI components, templates, and course patterns that made content creation faster and more consistent.
Built documentation, retailer guides, and editor resources that simplified complex workflows for clients.
Extended the experience through marketing campaigns, sales decks, email, print collateral, and promotional materials.