Redesigning an early-stage startup's onboarding experience.

A Promising Product

Lucidata offers quick and accurate personality tests to help companies and career consultants to build better teams. Think Myers-Briggs and CliftonStrengths, but faster and more applicable to the workplace.

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Lucidata has two groups of users: the “testers” who take the assessments and gain insights, and the “advisors” who purchase and administer the tests, like HR reps and career consultants.

The Problem

Lucidata's growth was stalling because users were treating it as a one-time service. Testers weren’t utilizing all of Lucidata’s offerings, even with the time they were investing in taking the assessment.

Additionally, testers would lose their results if they didn't set a password after completing the assessment. This forced advisors to re-administer the assessments, wasting resources and reducing retention.
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This led us to ask: how might we eliminate pain points in Lucidata’s onboarding experience?

Discovering Pain Points

I started by conducting think-aloud interviews with actual testers and advisors.

Information Gathering

I asked in-depth questions about their experiences with Lucidata versus competitors.

Contextual Interviews

I had my participants think aloud as they went through the assessment and onboarding process.

Affinity Mapping

I found trends in the qualitative data, looking at customer perceptions and pain points.
Here are some highlights from my research.
"Do I have to make an account to see my results? Why am I doing this?"
PAIN POINT #1
Testers are prompted to set a password after completing the assessment. But there was no context.

All participants were confused about why they needed to set a password. One participant was even tempted to exit without finishing the setup.
"Unless I clicked into each one, I wouldn't know what each report is or what it contains."
PAIN POINT #2
There were no descriptions for the reports on the dashboard. Most participants were confused about the purpose of having multiple reports.

When prompted to find a certain result, only 1 in 4 participants accessed the right report on the first try.
The problems continued on the backend of the site with advisors.

"When that happened, it made me pause a little, and my confidence level dropped."

"Right now, I'd have to go through each client's report and parse the data myself."

PAIN POINT #3
Lucidata's system had no workaround for testers forgetting to (or choosing not to) set a password.

If this happened, their reports were lost, and the advisors were unable to restore them.

This led to a loss of confidence in the service.

Then, I hit a roadblock.

During my research, internal stakeholders realized that improving the workflow for advisors wasn't financially feasible due to limitations with the site's backend structure.

So, I focused on improving the tester's experience in a way that would prevent common issues arising for advisors downstream.

Ideating & Wireframing

With everything I discovered through research and conversations with the team, I laid out 4 key design objectives.

Evoke a sense of trust.

Incorporate context and calls-to-action at critical conversion points to keep users informed.

Highlight the content.

Eliminate obstacles between users and Lucidata's diverse content offerings.

Make it responsive.

Develop a cohesive and accessible component library for seamless adaptation to mobile screens.

Make it feasible.

Preserve the core structure of the dashboard to expedite the implementation of the new design.
Guided by those objectives, I created some wireframes in Whimsical, where I started building out solutions for the core issues found in my research with testers.

Prototyping

After feedback from stakeholders, I combined solutions from my wireframes with the styles and structure of the current site to create a working prototype.

Feedback

I shared the prototype with stakeholders and gathered valuable feedback from stakeholders.
‍‍Due to low adoption by advisors, Lucidata’s stakeholders decided to remove and rework the "Anicon" assessment, leaving an large, empty space at the top of the dashboard where a user's Anicon was displayed.
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They also wanted to explore fluid animations for the dashboard's dropdowns, so I explored using nested auto-layout components to achieve a more realistic prototype.

The Solution

With the revised prototype, Lucidata's onboarding provides testers with a clean and contextualized interface, while respecting the limitations of the site's structure.
Look through the before-and-after's below!

Takeaways

I handed off the design to Lucidata's stakeholders. Informal testing showed a positive shift in users successfully completing the onboarding process.

‍Unfortunately, implementation was put on hold due to the startup's shifting priorities. If I’d had more time and resources, I would’ve conducted further testing with a larger sample size to validate my initial testing.

Regardless, this was a fascinating project, especially given my education in cognitive science. Throughout the process, I found value in...

Understanding (& embracing) limitations

When encountering constraints, I pivoted toward effective design solutions.

Being relentlessly resourceful

I researched and applied techniques that were new to me in order to create a realistic, feasible prototype.

Prioritizing simplicity

I preserved the core structure of the site with simple solutions to ease future implementation.

"Working with Jacob was a pleasure. Through his careful, detailed research and dedication to his craft, he created a new design that will help us streamline our user experience."

Curt Buermeyer
CEO, Lucidata

Thanks for reading!

Feel free to check out my other projects.

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