Optimizing a product onboarding experience using gamification.
Optimizing a product onboarding experience using gamification.
Client: AVIA
Role: Product Design Lead
Skills: Product Design, UX Research, Visual Design
Team: Product Lead (me), Product Manager
Timeframe: 3 months
The Problem
For the Marketplace platform to be helpful for health system buyers, it needed detailed vendor product profiles. But since there were no real incentives for vendors, over 70% of profiles were left incomplete.
The Solution
We introduced a reward system and profile health score to incentivize vendors to complete and optimize their profiles, enhancing visibility and discoverability on the platform.
Research Foundations
We talked to vendors in marketing, using a diagram to better understand their process, and found out where we could help make their process easier.
Exploration
During the explore phase of the project, I created a Jobs to Be Done framework, Empathy Maps, and conducted Competitor Research to thoroughly understand user needs, motivations, and the competitive landscape.
How might we motivate vendors to leverage our platform’s product profile to drive early sales success?
Jobs To Be Done
I created a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to gain a clear understanding of user needs and motivations. This framework helped us identify and focus on the fundamental tasks users aim to accomplish, providing a solid foundation for developing user-centered solutions.
Empathy Maps
Created empathy maps with fresh insights from vendor interviews, deepening our understanding of their needs, pain points, and motivations. This refreshed perspective enabled us to design effective onboarding experiences that catered to their behaviors, decisions, and goals.
Competitor Research
Conducted competitor research to inform our onboarding strategy, analyzing industry peers’ approaches to identify best practices, gaps, and areas for differentiation.
Ideation
I shared the research with the team and, using the design goals below, led an affinity diagramming session to brainstorm ideas for encouraging profile completion during onboarding.
Engage and Motivate: Design a product onboarding experience that makes completing profiles exciting, rewarding, and worthwhile for vendors.
Build Credibility: Clearly communicate the importance of becoming a believable vendor, highlighting the benefits of a complete and accurate profile.
Encourage Social Proof: Incentivize vendors to collect client reviews and showcase their credibility, building trust with potential customers.
Gamify Progress: Use gamification to make onboarding enjoyable and interactive, encouraging vendors to complete profiles and engage with the platform.
Boosting Profile Completion: Get over 50% of vendors to fully complete their profiles, which helps them build credibility and attract more customers.
Mapping the Onboarding Journey
Before designing, we created Service Blueprints to visualize the onboarding process and understand how each action triggers the next. This helped us identify key moments to motivate vendors to move forward and complete their profile.
Low Fidelity
We created low-fidelity mockups to rough out screen layouts, defining sections and establishing a visual hierarchy. This helped us focus on functionality and organization, ensuring a solid foundation for our design before refining the visual details.
The Final Design
We refined our designs into high-fidelity mockups, perfecting the details and ensuring they looked great on all screen sizes.
Updated dashboard with a visually appealing profile health widget, providing clear steps to achieve better health and highlighting the benefits of profile improvement.
The tasks section shows vendors exactly what to do to unlock rewards and gives them props when they complete tasks, helping them stay motivated and engaged.
Vendors earn badges for achievements, showcased on their product profile and shareable on social media, highlighting their excellence and building credibility.
A section that enables users to track and manage review requests, resend to non-responders, and create new requests, all in one place.
To demonstrate how completing tasks affects the overall health meter, I structured tasks into four groups—Weak, Gaining, Strong, and Robust—presented in a linear order and unlocked at each stage of completion. I clearly labeled each task group with actionable descriptions and included a benefit statement to reinforce the ‘why,’ creating a sense of urgency and guiding users to the corresponding area in the vendor portal.
I anticipated that return engagement to the dashboard might be low, so I created a series of email triggers designed to drive users back to the vendor portal. Each action completed triggered a personalized email prompt, guiding users to the next task and encouraging continued progress.
I added a detailed tracker to the product editing page, which showed completion statuses for sections like keywords, use cases, and videos. This allowed vendors to see exactly what tasks were needed, right where they were working.
Talked to our users
Before launch, we tested a simple prototype with our Product Advisory Board. Feedback was mixed—some were generally positive about the approach, while others were skeptical about the value of completing the profile work.
“Compared to a lot of the other platforms I’ve seen, what I really appreciate is the level of detail. The benefits of having a strong presence on the platform is clear.”
“What you’re building seems helpful, but the process seems long and I’m not guaranteed to see any benefits. …I’d like to spend the time here but will I get anything out of it?”
Based on the feedback, I revisited our ideation session to find features that would highlight the benefits of a robust profile. I added an analytics page to the vendor portal, showing how their profile compared to the network average. Links to this page were included in dashboard task tips to show competitors’ success and create FOMO.
Results
After launch, I partnered with the Business Intelligence team to track completion rates and analyze drop-off points. Initial results were moderate, so we closely monitored the reports. After 90 days, we successfully achieved our goal of over 50% profile completion.
BEFORE LAUNCH
30%
Completed “strong” profile rate
30 DAYS
36%
Completed “strong” profile rate
90 DAYS
54%
Completed “strong” profile rate
Successes
We used familiar gamification techniques that kept users engaged and motivated. We also showed vendors how building credibility on the platform could benefit them, which helped encourage their participation.
Challenges
Adoption of the new system was slower than we expected, so we should have worked harder to convince vendors of the platform’s value. The 90-day results were good, but more updates were needed to make the feature truly successful.