Making it easier to start coaching
Company MindGym
Team Product Designers, User Researcher, Product manager, Engineering and Behavioural Science teams
Role Content & UX designer
Problem
Starting a coaching programme is hard enough
The onboarding process for customers to book their first coaching session was slow. Hotjar insights and qualitative feedback identified some key pain points:
Customers needed to enter a lot of free text about their goals for coaching. This was time-consuming and effortful and many did not complete it.
Customers could not select their availability before receiving a list of coach recommendations – leading to lots of calendar-checking and drop-off if availability wasn’t found.
Solution
Make it easier to take the first step
I explored a new user flow concept using wireframes that adopted a more ‘lean-back’, tappable experience using category selection. The categories aimed to provide prompts for self-reflection and were inspired by core goal categories reported by customers and coaches. Customers could also select their availability upfront, to only filter coaches available when they were.
Engaging senior stakeholders with early ideas
I used early wireframe flows as a springboard for storytelling to engage our senior stakeholders with the problem and proposed solution. They responded well to being brought in early in the process and were very responsive to the concept.
Creating intuitive and useful categories
We developed ‘focus areas’ as prompts for self-reflection, based on the language and topics most selected by customers. Categories evolved over many iterations as we aligned focus areas with our behavioural science framework and built confidence in the final solution in user testing.
Keeping a free-text option
Some qualitative information was important for coaches to help them prepare for their sessions and encourage customers to express their goals in their own words. We kept one free-text question but learned that the first session was the most appropriate place for deeper consideration of their goal.
Aligning coach and customer calendars
Our customers were busy people with hectic calendars. We added a skippable calendar choice to align coach recommendations with customer availability to simplify the booking process. As we introduced various improvements to the onboarding process we saw a +56% increase in activation rate.
Biggest challenge
Championing customer needs with stakeholders
There needed to be a meaningful agreement between the customer experience of ‘focus areas’ with psychological models of behavioural change and other product solutions. We met with leaders of the behavioural science team over many weeks to collaborate on a solution. Data and insights from user research and usability testing helped us build a persuasive case for prioritising the needs and language of our customers.