Prosper

ROLE
Research
UX/UI
Art direction

DATE
Feb 2018 - Aug 2019

By connecting users to career coaches for 1-on-1 video sessions, Prosper helped modern professionals achieve their career goals faster.

As the sole designer at Prosper, my work on the product strategy and UX/UI helped land a feature as Apple's App of the Day & 4.9 stars in the App Store.

THE PROBLEM

Unfortunately, Prosper's initial launch received few downloads and purchases. Users were not finding value in the the UX or the offering.

At the time, their app helped college students and young professionals prepare for interviews. Users recorded themselves answering an interview question and then sent it back for feedback from a career coach.

01

Discovering the pain points

BEGINNING THE RESEARCH

To get the bottom of this engagement issue, I conducted more than a dozen interviews with the target audience.

It became clear that many users:

felt incredibly intimidated recording themselves
found feedback abrasive and harsh without an established face-to-face relationship with their coach
thought they were interacting with a bot, not a human

TESTING SOLUTIONS

We considered replacing the coach feedback with computer generated feedback. This would allows us to significantly lower our pricing. Unfortunately, interviewing relies heavily on vocal tone, body language and storytelling. Current technology would struggle to give good feedback.

Instead, we asked coaches to send a selfie welcome video to the user to build a connection immediately. We also edited the language in the app to make users feel more comfortable submitting a video of themselves. In addition, we allowed users to submit an answer using just audio.

This change worked wonders. Users began interacting more frequently with coaches. Several users even landed jobs at big names like Facebook and Deloitte.

But even with marketing, we didn't have the growth that we needed.

02

Pivoting the offering

3 MONTHS, NEW PRODUCT

To this point, the Prosper team had not done extensive market research. I encouraged the team to invest a survey that dug into the main problems that concerned professionals, how much they would be willing to pay for help, ect.

The results changed everything. It was clear that we had the wrong painpoint. While interviewing stressed college students out, they were not willing to pay to practice interviewing. However, older professionals wanted help making career decisions, starting businesses, developing their leadship skills and more. They wanted this help on demand and did not want to spend more than $50.

To fill this need, we decided to transform Prosper into a career coaching platform. We would help users: pick the right career, get the job they want, find work/life balance, start a business or develop their leadership skills.

03

Rebranding

CREATING A NEW BRAND

I knew that in order for our new audience to take us seriously, we needed a new brand. The illustrations and casual language did little to inspire confidence in our coaching. It felt young, inexpensive and tech-y.

We worked with a branding studio to create a logo and select the typography, the colors and the photography style for coach profiles.

I asked them to:

make the brand feel human because that's the heart of Prosper
appeal to type A personality types by selling structure, action, ambition and success
portray confidence and sophistication
include a versatile, sans serif typeface that would be easy to read in the app

CREATING PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS

We needed a bold way to illustrate various concepts in the app, the marketing site and on social media. To do this, I art directed a series of photo illustrations.

I found the photographer, delivered a detailed brief to the their team and attended the photoshoot for guidance.

I proposed 3 directions but we chose a minimal, colorful style because:

it required the minimal amount of planning and preparation
could be executed by the photographer in one day (on budget)
text could be place over the images easily without legibility issues

CREATING THE UI SYSTEM

With the brand and photography finished, I began creating the UI system based off the brand.

With the typography already selected, the process was straight-forward.

In the end, I decided to:

use rectangular, slightly rounded buttons for a balance of elegance and approchability
expand the brand colors to provide greater flexibility when designing the UI

02

Pivoting the UX

USER TESTING

I tested my wireframes with 20 to 35 year-old millennials on UserTesting.com.

We learned:

Given the wealth of free career advice online, the vast majority of people felt very skeptical about paying to speak to a coach. Offering a free discovery call put them at ease. This offer needed to be one of the first things the user saw when visiting our marketing site or when onboarding on the app.
Social proof on coach profiles helped convince users of the value of coaching
Lastly, it was important that the coaching call provide incredible value. The calls needed to be organized and the coaches needed to come prepared. The user needed to walk away clear about the insights they discovered and the action items they commited to.

HIGHLIGHTING THE DISCOVERY SESSION OFFER

We reiterated the offering for a free Intro Call often in the experience.

We included it in:

the app store screenshots
marketing materials
onboarding of the app

HELPING USERS FIND THIER PERFECT COACH

We then worked diligently at matching the coaches to the users. We asked the users their main goal and then asked them to pick from a list of related subgoals.

From testing, we learned people really wanted someone with a deep understanding of their industry. So we paired them with coaches who had experience in the industry or coaching people in it.

For the coaches profile, I was really inspired by the social proof Airbnb includes at the top of their listings. To get this data, we asked the users to fill out a brief survey after each session.

Lastly, we didn't want users to give up if they did not feel a connection with their coach. If their ratings were low, we asked them to try another coach.

IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE SESSIONS

In order to create loyalty and extend the coach relationship, I needed to ensure that every minute of a session was impactful and that the user remembered their insights and commitments.

To do this, I created:

A pre-session checkin that asked the user a series of questions that the coach used as an agenda during the session
An action plan sent from the coach to the user that included a summary of the conversation and a series of action items

04

Improving the UX after launch

TROUBLE WITH NO SHOWS

A little while after launch, we discovered a lot of users were not showing up to their scheduled discovery sessions. No-shows not only frustrated coaches, but they cost us money because we paid the coaches for their time regardless.

To combat this, we:

added a quick questionaire before a user could schedule a session
built a robust reminder system
made it easy to reschedule/cancel

This lead significantly less no-shows and a 20% increase in paid sessions (and more people opting to buy in bulk).

THE RESULTS

Thanks to great coaches and great UX, Prosper appeared as Apple's App of the Day and users rated it 4.9 stars in the App Store.

Key learnings:

Invest in market research early to test your offering
User interviews (especially when conducted live) do not provide a trustworthy view of user demand because users feel pressure to give uplifting/positive answers

Brinna Thomsen is a UX/UI designer who helps brands create valuable user experiences

Email
brinna.thomsen@gmail.com

LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/brinna-thomsen