Hone Club

Right before the pandemic, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the co-founders of an online BizTech learning community to redesign and enhance their website's user experience (UX). Our mission was clear: to bolster the website's conversion rate by mitigating bounce rates and enhancing user sign-ups, all with the ultimate goal of fostering a thriving community that could showcase talent and share expertise. We gave ourselves a period of three weeks to accomplish this task, which required a minor adjustment once the pandemic had taken full effect.

In the realm of BizTech, community spaces often require active engagement on their platform and can be quite overwhelming. The BizTech community is also vast - encompassing many roles and skills outside of engineering (product, sales, design, etc.). However, at Hone Club, the primary objective was to identify knowledge and amplify experiences that were relevant to their user base. The founders strove to achieve this by taking the time to familiarize themselves with each member, ensuring folks receive the most pertinent responses from those who are best equipped to provide them.

The founders were vital sources of information since they had a lot of familiarity with the BizTech (the business side of tech companies) space. I also talked to folks in the target group to better understand their needs and preferences. From said research, we identified that users found it difficult to navigate the website. Users also had difficulty understanding relevant information regarding community benefits before signing up - contributing to the high bounce rates.

About halfway through the project, we expanded our scope to include helping those displaced by COVID-19. We focused on helping folks in the service industry who have transferable skills learn more about what it would take to pivot into the tech industry. As a newly established initiative, the program would be solely reliant on volunteers, thus it was crucial to ensure that users and volunteers alike were well-informed on how to participate.

To move quickly, I focused on creating new branding while the founders focused on content design. Using the insights from our research, I redesigned and streamlined the website's layout and navigation to make information more intuitive and user-friendly to locate. In regards to the branding, we opted to introduce new colors that maintained a professional outlook while also exuding a playful and welcoming feel.

We conducted small, informal usability tests to ensure the website's redesign was easier to navigate than the previous iteration. We got participants who represented the target audience and asked them to complete specific tasks on the website. We observed their behavior and recorded their feedback. Based on the feedback, we made further improvements to the design.

After launching the redesigned website on Wix, we saw a significant improvement in the website's conversion rate. Bounce rates were reduced by 20%, and the average session duration increased by 20%. Overall traffic increased 3x-5x as well, with the first cohort having to be capped in order to provide a personalized experience that could be scaled appropriately in the future.

Moving Fast, But Not Cutting Corners: With such a short deadline, it was important to recognize what’s available - be it testing, design iteration, and others. By keeping a fluid design process, I was able to deliver on time.

Improvements: Since I utilize a mobile-friendly approach, some small UI errors went through on larger (think ultra-wide) desktop screens. In the future, I would test responsiveness on a greater set of resolutions.

Community-Driven: Although the initial project began and concluded as a community, the emphasis on including those impacted by the pandemic aligned with my values. During a period when it was commonplace to experience isolation and difficulties individually, it was crucial to establish a community that could provide support to individuals in different stages of their careers.