A product with hidden promise

PeopleGrove approached our team looking to solve a specific problem:

Too few people were creating accounts

‍Over 99% of outreach emails to the target audience ( failed to generate a successful sign-up. They've grown by focusing on their customers (higher education institutions) but needed to address the concerns and motivations of their end users (college students & alumni).

Improving the content and logic of this early customer touchpoint framed our alignment on the KPIs and business goals as we moved into our research.

Setting the target

After laying out the existing flows visually, we could make some initial hypotheses as to why engagement (and conversion) was so low:
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Peering through the fog

Discussing the research plan with our PM helped us validate the “right” problem and enabled an appropriate user-based solution to the obstacles around higher rates of user sign-ups (conversional goal).

Initial Solutions

Dialing in our research plan helped us validate the “right” problem and enabled an appropriate user-based solution to the obstacles around higher rates of user sign-ups (conversional goal).

Key Insights

First, we decided to update the user flow to provide a clear and separate offering to each of our two target audiences: students and alumni. The initial division didn't capitalize on the distinct characteristics of these separate audiences and, consequently, both groups responded accordingly by abandoning the flow. Due to project time constraints and a team member jumping ship, we focused only on the student flow.

Because our team was small and our project window tight (we lost a designer to a new gig along the way), my partner and I divided and conquered. I addressed structure and content of the landing page with our opportunity areas as guidance.

I used Content Designer Terry Podmajersky’s model for understanding the perspectives of business and user goals in a virtuous product cycle:

Fine-tuning through testing

Following the credo of “test early and often”, we generated a quick-turnaround, clickable prototype to observe user behaviors and attitudes. Below are some of the improvements we implemented in response to user feedback before putting together a mid-fidelity to ship.

Converging on the final deliverable

Providing iterative feedback to each of our respective elements, my partner and I merged the landing page and sign-up flow into a Figma prototype. Because of the positive stakeholder reviews of the previous iterations, we decided to put in a few extra hours and gloss the wireframes with a little institutional design.

My partner is an alumnus at UC Berkeley, as were some of our interviewees, and because PeopleGrove's platform is a white label product, we used the university's visual identity for the prototype.