Product experience, Strategy, UX design

Imperative product experience

Client Industry: Employee Wellness, Learning & Development
Client Revenue & Footprint: Early-Stage Startup, National
Project Duration: 1 month

BRIEF

Imperative is an innovative, early-stage SaaS startup dedicated to improving employee well-being. Its leadership development platform uses the power of peers to support each other as they manage remote employees and accelerated change in the workplace. Through Imperative’s video-based coaching platform, leaders meet in rotating pairs for scripted peer-to-peer coaching conversations that adapt dynamically as their needs change.

Refresh the overall look-and-feel of the Imperative product experience. Elevate and hone the brand voice, core messaging, and product experience to articulate the value of Imperative’s peer coaching platform to employees, program administrators, client executive leadership (buyers), and investors.

MEMBER ON-BOARDING EXPERIENCE

Imperative developed a proprietary “purpose questionnaire” with academics and employers to help employees define what brings them fulfillment and a sense of purpose, so that they can intentionally design their careers and thrive. The questionnaire is the backbone of the member experience, as it it used to determine peer levels and to determine a suitable coach for each member.

CHALLENGE

• Employees often join the Imperative platform without any context or grounding in what peer coaching is or how it will benefit them.

• Completion rates for the existing on-boarding experience were extremely low.

• Completing on-boarding to the platform is a lengthy process divided into 2 parts: the purpose questionnaire and demographic questions.

• New functionality necessitated that additional demographic questions be added to the existing experience.

• Users must feel like they are being effortlessly guided through the process by a friendly, trusted coach.

USER ORIENTATION

The existing experience relied heavily on lengthy, text-only slides that disrupt the flow, interrupted users, and required extra clicks to continue. This significantly increased the barrier to entry to the platform experience, creating intense user frustration before they’ve had a chance to digest the purpose or value of the program.

Rather than transporting users directly to the questionnaire upon sign-in, the revised flow navigates users to a product orientation page that explains what members can expect to gain from the overall product experience and explains each step in the on-boarding process.

Streamlining the purpose questionnaire

The new on-boarding flow coaches users through the process, clearly indicating their progress, how the information will be used to improve their experience, and sets expectations for what they will be asked to do next and how long that step will take.

Where possible, slides were consolidated to reduce the number of clicks required to complete the task.

Updated top navigation is consistent with the rest of the product experience, while still preventing users from accidentally navigating outside the on-boarding flow.

PEER COACH EXPERIENCE

Challenge

The new experience must include new messaging and demonstrate the value of peer coaching for new and experienced users.

• Primary action is to begin the next conversation with the current coach.

• Must provide a link to the member’s Purpose Profile. This must be clearly visible upon completion of on-boarding.

• Must show the member’s network (or network potential, in the case of new members) of current and past peer coaches.

To this end, the revised home page is divided into sections:

1. Network of past coaches and the relationship they’re building with their current coach through guided coaching conversations.

2. Current fulfillment and actions they’ve committed to taking to improve it.

3. Discovery and learning resources, including access to their purpose profile.

Visualizing the member’s network

PROGRAM ROI FOR ADMINS & EXECS

VISUALIZING THE VALUE OF THE PLATFORM

We created a dedicated results page to enable program administrators (HR or L&D admins) to quickly and effectively communicate the value of the platform to their executive leadership. In the future, this module will also contain other administrative reports as well. The graphs would utilize existing formatting and code, so placeholder graphs were used in the prototype.

The business needed to provide additional context to admin users about the new functionality. Including this marketing and instructional messaging in-line would clutter the page, so we opted to house it in a pop-out help panel.

OUTCOME

As the Director of Product Experience, I :

• Defined product strategy and collaborated with Engineering, Customer Support, and Marketing teams to develop a product roadmap with prioritized feature releases.

• Improved the UX, reducing customer friction and pain points across the product platform.

  • Created a new design system to support in-house and off-shore engineering teams using different code bases, while incorporating a modern, clean aesthetic.

  • Strategically designed navigational architecture and layouts to accommodate upcoming features and capabilities.

• Produced marketing collateral that increased conversion rates 7x and significantly increased webinar attendance.

• Co-created investor pitch decks with the CEO.

• Developed the brand’s messaging framework, including: business value proposition, target audience (personas), differentiators, brand promise, brand voice and tone, pillars, and elevator pitch statements.