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*Disclaimer: To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I’ve removed market research data from this case study.
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Four product team members, 5 client staff members
UX Researcher. I also designed screens for the member payment flow.
1 month
To increase attendance, excitement, engagement, and deep relationship building within professional interest sub-groups
Parity Partners, a “for purpose” startup organization, aims to address the scarcity of women in high impact leadership roles by train the next generation of female leaders for leadership positions. One of its signature initiatives, the Parity Professional Program (P3), was created to help women advance their mission by helping women build targeted networks and develop skills to accelerate their careers.
P3’s program comprises of groups, known as “pods”, which are a key part of the success of the program as they offer curated content and in-person, focused group activities. However, these pods had mixed results. As these pods are manually curated by Parity Partner staff by industry experience, tenure, professional goals, and availability, staff identified this process as “incredibly time intensive, manual, and frustrating.”
Our UX team conducted a design ideation workshop with the Parity Partners teams to explore the problem space and generate design ideas to meet their business needs. During our initial stakeholder ideation sessions with 4 key staff members, we identified the following key assumptions and findings:
Assumptions
Findings
During these sessions, Parity Partners project partners identified their primary goals and secondary goals for this design project:
Primary goals:
Secondary goals:
To ensure the success of these goals, the P3 staff identified metrics based on their business goals:
Since Parity Partners did not have a full-time tech team, they preferred solutions that were “out-of-the-box” solutions but were able to engage their contract developers to create a fully customized solutions, as needed. Staff proposed a platform that would integrate with their website, with potential app development in the future.
Our meet the business needs and constraints of our client, our team conducted a workshop with P3 staff to align on features that would be implemented on the first feature rollout. Based on the workshop, the feature prioritization for key elements were:
Our user experience team conducted desk research to develop business competitive and comparative matrices, which we used to assess product-market fit by surveying the current landscape of organizations which served the professional development of women.
Our user experience team conducted desk research to develop business competitive and comparative matrices, which we used to assess product-market fit by surveying the current landscape of organizations which served the professional development of women.
Next, our team conducted feature analysis research using the companies identified in the competitive and comparative matrices to outline the key features of each organization’s structure, event components, and benefits compared to Parity Partners.
We worked with staff to analyze their recent market research survey of their membership and to recruit members of the P3 program for user interviews.
Next, our team conducted feature analysis research using the companies identified in the competitive and comparative matrices to outline the key features of each organization’s structure, event components, and benefits compared to Parity Partners.
Full feature analysis document can be found here.
In addition to our stakeholder ideation meetings with P3 staff, we conducted 5 remote interviews with P3 general members and pod leaders to understand their motivations, behaviors, and needs. We drafted a research guide with the following primary questions:
We then synthesized results from our interviews using affinity mapping to identify patterns, laddering up to themes, which we then summarized in the voice of P3 members:
“I want to be surrounded by people with the same experience and professional level as myself.”
“I want to build deep relationships with my fellow pod members.”
“I want to accomplish my personal and professional in my pod.”
“I don’t understand how the pod matching process works.”
“I feel uninformed by P3 staff.”
“I want to know what membership benefits I’m paying for.”
“I look for engaged and knowledgeable leaders for mentorship”
“I find scheduling pod meetings to be difficult, frustrating & time-consuming”
Self-selection podding process categorized by interests and different stages of professional development
Streamlined and clear membership intake process
Database for leaders to access P3 resources and activities for pod meetings
Scheduling system to find flexible and optimal meeting times for members
Research Analysis Summary:
Following our synthesis and analysis of qualitative interviews, we developed 3 personas for the main user groups: pod members, pod leaders, and P3 staff.
Next, we developed the user journey for the primary persona based on insights from the qualitative interviews as well as P3 program key touchpoints. A key factor in the program that we illustrated in the user journey was that early career professionals were eligible to advance to senior and/or leadership positions after they reach 7 years of professional experience.
We also collaborated with Parity Partners’ website developer to identify technological constraints that would affect the designs and user flow, and prioritized Parity Partners’ need for “out-the-box” solutions versus custom designs for the first feature. We identified several APIs our client used (ex. membership management, payments, social media, event management, and geolocation services) that would need to be integrated into the design.
We also defined the information hierarchy needed to integrate the platform into the website based on the behaviors, needs, and goals of members, leaders, and staff.
We developed user flows for both pod members and pod leaders to define the “ideal” path both customer segments would take to complete the main tasks as identified by the user research.
We developed mobile wireframes for our responsive design so that our designs would render on mobile devices. This would also meet the needs of our client’s membership and create a seamless experience from desktop to mobile.
Our team created mid-fidelity wireframes for the member user flow, pod leader flow. Although we removed the staff flow from design prioritization, we created rough wireframes to better communicate how staff resources and communication would incorporate with the member and leader flows.
Member flow design priorities:
The mid-fidelity wireframes focused on the business goal of having members select their own pods based on pod matches.
Leader flow design priorities:
The pod leader wireframes focused on creating events based on aggregated member availability.
We conducted an initial wireframe test with the developer, and made adjustments to the designs based on the following tech recommendations:
Our team worked with our client to identify a style guide for the platform based on the existing color scheme, typography, logo and headers of the existing Parity Partners Website.
Our team conducted three rounds of usability tests with five users each round for the member and leader flows. The first two rounds of testing were conducted on the mid-fidelity wireframes. The third round of testing was conducted while using high fidelity wireframes.
We developed a usability testing guide to analyze the usability of the proposed mid-fidelity wireframes based on three main tasks:
While there were no failed results in testing, many of our users took indirect paths to complete tasks, most notably on Task #1 (finding a pod and completing a payment) and Task#3 (message the pod leader).
The following are key changes we made to the usability based on usability session feedback:
Round 1 design
Round 2 iteration
After making changes to the designs to accommodate user feedback, our third round of usability testing showed improvement from the first two rounds based on the previous feedback. Our team noted that users took more indirect paths for this round, specifically for Task #2 “update your availability”. Users noted that they wanted to edit their availability directly from the calendar integrated into the profile page instead of clicking into the “Edit Profile” section of the page.
We developed a usability testing guide to analyze the usability of the proposed mid-fidelity wireframes based on three main tasks:
While there were no failed results in testing, many of our users took indirect paths to complete tasks in Task #3.
The following are key changes we made to the usability based on usability session feedback:
While there were no failed results in testing, many of our users took indirect paths to complete tasks in Task #3. We added functionality to the user path by allow users to select the event name directly instead of navigating to past events on the group page.
Our research found multiple avenues in which we can enrich and improve upon Parity Partners’ online site for the P3 program in order to create a cohesive digital ecosystem for their pod members. To meet this goal, we propose the following recommendations:
Members:
Leaders:
Member Flow: Pod Self-Selection
Member Flow: Membership Payment
Member Flow: Member Profile
Leader Flow: Onboarding Training
Leader Flow: Create an Event
Leader Flow: Upcoming & Past Events
As a member of professional development organizations, I was excited to work on a project that would help create an ecosystem to support women’s advancement in professional leadership positions. After completing this project, I’ve noted some ways to improve the processes in order to tailor the designs to better align the identified audiences:
Overall, our recommendations aimed to meet the goals of Parity Partners’ P3 experience, resulting increased streamlined orientation processes, increased use of P3 websites, and ultimately higher member satisfaction for members, leaders and staff. The new phase of research should be conducted to understand how the platform is implemented by the developer and new rebranding team, and gain insight into the user experience for P3 members once the platform’s designs are implemented.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 2020.