My Role
Product Designer — UX, UI, User Research
Team
Hallie Weiss — Product Manager
Morgan Whitney — Engineering Manager
Jordan Byron — Full-Stack Engineer
Matt Drouhard — Front-End Engineer
Vlad Zagorodnyuk — iOS Engineer
Walker Wilkins — Android Engineer
Kathryn Saulsgiver — People Scientist
Timeline
1 year, Feb 2021 - Feb 2022
Overview
Impact
We released a community product to 10k+ users and this became a key selling point for companies interested in low cost solutions for their workforce.
Discovery
Three years of research pointed to a growing problem.
BetterUp connects employees of customer organizations (members) with an executive coach to work on their goals. However, we had never accounted for the fact that a supportive, communal environment is often a requisite for lasting, positive change.
Ideation
The BetterUp Member Community on a third-party platform. At its peak, we had 446 members from 28 companies, with 35% weekly active contributors. The industry average is 10%.
Testing
To validate hypotheses, we launched a member community on a third-party platform. I was the community manager.
This was a quick and cheap way to learn before getting engineers involved. Over 10 weeks, we tested various methods of engaging members and observed how people acted in a digital community setting. I was involved daily, responding to people's posts, hosting digital meet-ups, conducting polls, and more.
Design
After testing for 10 weeks, the team felt confident moving forward and building an in-app community.
We decided on the MVP features, and we used these to map out the user flow and wireframes. I held working sessions to discuss this flow, including how they’d appear on mobile and the data modeling required to support this MVP. After rigorous review and approval, I moved on to applying our visual language to these wireframes.
Testing
We released the MVP community internally to 600 employees.
In the MVP, members could access a general community group, create a post, comment on a post, and delete a post or comment. The functionality was intentionally limited to establish an engagement baseline.
Outcome
For the GA launch, we added features that went beyond the MVP and would ensure a great experience for members.
These features included a first-time UX, topic-based groups, photo uploads, threaded comments, reporting content, notifications, and links to FAQ and Community Guidelines.