The University of Edinburgh is procuring a Short Courses Platform and the goal of our research with learners and colleagues was to understand what they are looking for in this platform. In particular, how they use the course catalogue on the platform and what their expectations of the virtual Learning environment (VLE) are. We analysed key trends and did user interviews to determine the needs and requirements of prospective learners and stakeholders for the course catalogue, including how to optimise the search and filters, catalogue homepage, groupings and course ‘about’ information. Building upon the research insights into considerations for platform we designed a prototype short courses platform and conducted mass user testing to validate these insights. The results of the mass usability testing produced a final learnings and recommendations report that includes key findings for the catalogue and VLE which will feed into the University requirements and configuration projects.