Jason Wang
UCD/Program Redesign/Behavior Change
With over ten years of experience, Yeh IDeology is a leading Design, Strategy, and Innovation recruitment firm.Based out of New York, It works with clients nationally and internationally. At the beginning of 2018, After collecting a large amount of recruitment experience across industries, Yeh IDeology decided to launch an innovational 8 weeks executive coaching program, Thrive By Design, to help creatives who have 10-25 years of experience to develop their future career paths.
Our Problems
Lack of user engagement
With the combination of over 10 years of recruitment experience across industries and the compelling content in the program, my colleagues were confident that they could help our members achieve their career goals easily. Yeh Ideology was committed to helping every user (we called them "Thrivers") in this program to pivot their career roles successfully. It required every Thriver to collaborate with us and put aside 3-10 hours weekly to interact with our coaches on the program tasks.However, it was impossible to keep them fully engaged in a high-intensity program. Especially, most of the Thrivers were senior-level professionals who already suffered too much stress from their work and families. Fortunately, TBD was a premium, small program, only dozens of members enrolled in our program monthly. It gave me a chance to observe every thriver, collect the user data and tackled their challenges effectively.
Due to NDA, I can't provide many details of my work as some of the features are not yet released by Yeh IDeology.
My Contributions
Before & After
Research
Measuring user engagement
Before I joined the company, none of my colleagues were available to track user data and quantify user engagement. In order to quickly conquer new markets, most of my coworkers had to devote most of their time to create compelling content for the current members or promote the program. We only had some vague impressions about our members: many members had no time to finish their program tasks or participate online coaching meeting, few of them even complained that they failed to achieve their career goals through the program. However, what we heard from our members couldn't help us move forward to conduct any accurate researches. We needed to evaluate user engagement comprehensively and understand the extremes and mainstreams in the program.
There was a lot of room for user engagement improvement, but first all, we needed to talk to our member first, especially ,those who were barely engaged in the program.
Extremes & Mainstreams
An idea that suits an extreme user would nearly certainly work for the majority .If we could talk to extreme inactive members and come up with some solutions for them to make sure they could at least spend 2 -3 hours on the TBD tasks. It could spark our creativity by exposing us to use cases, hacks and better design opportunities that we'd never imagined.We tried to reach out to some of inactive members and figured out their problems.
(Time and resources alway work against us ,from the hundreds of emails we sent to our inactive members , we felt there are something wrong happened between our members and us. It made me realize that recruiting participants is an essential skill for UX designers as well.)
"Being busy was the major reason that our members couldn't get engaged with this program .Also it was the major excuse they said when they couldn't complete the program tasks on time."
Session Review
Most of the thrivers were senior creatives who might not be available to participate in our research. Instead of shooting them hundreds of appointment emails desperately, I rifled through our archived documents, the previous phone call transcriptions with our members , to group similar insights from their talking to help us understand their problems
The emotional changes of Thrivers
at different phases.
EMOTION
Besides TBD, the other resources that thrivers used to solve their problems.
RESOURCE
What problems did they think they had?what were their real problems?Did thrivers agree with the current solutions for them.
REAL PROBLEM
FEEDBACK
Some feedback from thrivers to help us improve our program.
such as their reviews for the TBD class content.
(Four types of points I grouped )
(Phone call transcriptions)
If our members were stuck on a problem for too long, they would become fickle and desperate to grab any opportunities to help them achieve their goals .
Sometimes it made things worse.
Customer Journey Map
Ideation
How Would We Motivate Our Members To Complete Tasks?
Although Yeh Ideology had a successful reputation for tackling clients' career challenges and accomplishing their needs, According to my research , there was stills a giant gap between what we wanted our member to do and what our members wanted to do.Our program should be deemed "useful" for our members. But in fact, they were too smart to follow the coach's instructions. Our members preferred to watch what they want to learn, and ignored what we request them to learn.
TBD User Flow
Iteration
Time was not on our side.As a start up and small business program, we would lose our members if we couldn't react well to our members' feedback.Therefore, we ignored some design processes , ran the user test and improve our design quickly.
Improve readability for elder members
According to our database, 40% of our members are over 50 years old. Reading small words on the website could be very challenging as their ages. After we finished a preliminary user testing, we found that we need to make our website age-friendly, we stuck with some elements such as avoided patterned backgrounds, dark color schemes and made website layout one-columned to improve the elder member's reading experience.
Group Meeting
Occasionally, we hosted the group meeting to encourage our members to share their ideas with others effectively. But we still preferred 1:1 session to protect our members' privacy. when we ran the user testing, we found, for those who tried the new vision online classes became more engaged and more likely to share their feedback in the group.As the participants spammed their message on the chat page, we knew it was the time to host group meeting regularly . We created an online survey quickly and touched base with our members to figure out the meeting agenda.
Conclusion
Rather than creating a user-friendly program, we should make Thrive By Design user-motivated.
Solutions
Public Website
Since Yeh Ideology Team was still uncertain about how to introduce TBD to public on the website and attract potential members to book a call with them.As someone who had a comprehensive understanding about this program, I suggested my team to revise the copy and redesign the program sale page.
Welcome To Thrive By Design
We can help you overcome whatever hurdles you’re facing to catapult your career to new heights.
Colors and Typeface
We created a clean and analogous color palette to enhance the reading experience and provide a clear direction and ideal experience for users.
Website User Flow
Drip Lesson To Member Weekly
Content dripping is highly effective in preventing content overload for members.In the program, we unlock the modules weekly for our members . Rather than previewing the all the lessons of TBD, we encourage our member to take enough time to review the previous content.
An Integration Platform
We hope our members can understand the context relationship between the different modules , By using a lot of bold words and buttons we enhance our member's learning experience and motivate them to share their ideas with other members in our private Facebook group.
Thursday Q&A Group Meeting
Every two weeks, our coaches will host a Q&A meeting for our members ,the coaches will review members' progress and ensure they are moving in the right direction, and also ,in this meeting ,the members have a chance to talk to others across the industries. They may have a brainstorm and spark a brilliant idea for their career future.
The Postcards For TBD Members
Result
User Engagement Improvement
It made me excited seeing how our member engagement increased dramatically , after we released the new version program within 8 weeks. It turned out that 95% of our members could put aside more than 5 hours to complete tasks and interact with their coaches spontaneously.
Current Members Engagement Score
Previous Members
Engagement Score
Word of Mouth Marketing
The new version TBD program also caused the chain reaction in marketing .Since more and more members satisfied with our new services, they tended to recommend the program to their friends who also had similar career problems. The Word of mouth marketing made our marketing strategy more diverse and eventually hit 1.6 times more than the pledged number of monthly new member enrollment. It also helped to set the reputation of our brand.
Before
After
The Takeaway
It was fulfilling to be able to give a startup program a hand and create something that propelled the company to the next level, but at the same time I knew that it’s just a start and there will be endless challenges ahead of us.
Although We committed to ensure every thriver to achieve their career role successfully, we had to say we can't .No matter what we tried, we were frustrated that 6%-8% users were still inactive and ignored the instructions.
The whole Thriver journey is the process that we applied UCD methodology to adjust their mindsets and let them trust our program.
This program was a great exercise in designing within constraints. Our budget, the scope, and the technology used on the online coaching platform introduced numerous and nuanced constraints that I needed to keep in mind while developing concepts.