Start with a system design, then deeper to the feature

Start big, then narrow down

Thinking systematically brings your team opportunity and flexibility

As one becomes more senior in their product design career, the challenge sometimes become more abstract, conceptual, and much broader to tackle. 

How to cultivate a systematic thinking, then narrow down to areas to gradually seize the iteration opportunities could encourage the team to move flexibly, and open up directions to explore the product opportunities. Just like painting, you start with judging the composition, capturing the lightness, then narrow down to the texture and strokes techniques.

If one starts with a user-interface building mindset to think about the solutions to the challenges, one could possibly miss the opportunities on their ways, and possibly not strengthening the product as a whole.

Case study: User profile completion

2019, at Course Hero, it is the year of "Building a community" in our team. We have a significant number of educators in our product. We figured it'd be a great opportunity to bridge the users so they would benefit from each other's experiences, so thus strengthen the engagement to our product. 

Just as Airbnb, how'd you encourage a house-owner to open up their living spaces, your rooms and your belongings to a total user?

Team's goal is easy but ambitious: 

We set up a "profile completion" goal where we will acquire faculty members' information, their areas of expertise and experiences. With sufficient profile information within a user, we will have the foundation to encourage the community to start build trust and connect with one another for inspiring professional teachings in their classroom.

Challenge: people don't reveal themselves, they don't want to take time filling in their personal information.

Start big: Two systematic thinking exercises.

1. Look at the map: Product map vs. User journey

Seeing the full picture of the product map gives us the advantage to compare the high traffic areas, user's journey among different user tasks, and their focus level from a high level. For example, one would hardly think logically while they are navigating and driving a car. Likewise, we de-prioritize the areas where the focus level will be low and thus the execution bar is high. 

We noticed while acquiring users in the onboarding process, we could introduce the community story within. That gives us the breathing space to welcome the opportunity to engage their attention in building up their basic information. We also note that the flow could benefit by being automatic, sufficient social proof, and clarity. As a result, they will take the action without much efforts, questions, plus, build trust in us and engage.

A second touch point would be while they start browsing the library with in the product. They focus would be on reading and searching for contents, Thus that'd be where we could grab their scattered attention bit by bit. One piece of information at a time. 

By mapping out the areas and having a discussion among the stakeholders, opportunities are documented and acknowledged. It later introduce the opportunities from the first round of feature launch.

2. Bridging users' goal with the business goal, or vise versa.

In a second exercise, we jotted down all the educator information that one would possibly be interested in by another faculty. They are prioritized in the context of: if one educator desire to find another educator to learn their teachings, what information they will depend on to find the connections?

With that prioritization, we compared such with our ultimate business goal: connecting users. What would be the information that'd welcome an educator to at least start saying hi. 

Course teaching, position, title and school are already acquired within the pipeline, awesome! We then  compare both of the question above and sorted out three layers of profile information that we prioritized: 1. profile photo and area of expertise. 2. teaching history and past education. 3. Awards and their publications.

By mapping out the prioritization, we also map out the impact of the data, and how'd we could quantify the impact by the project. And most importantly, where we should start narrowing down to the features level and improve the opportunity to obtain the user data.

Narrow down: Photo upload and CV parsing features

We built a profile photo upload feature with a CV parsing feature within the onboarding flow. With that, we hope to obtain a photo uploaded that show a face of an educator. And with enough social proof, and a illusion of the basic profile is set up, they will continue to fill out the rest of the information, with the easy tool that we provide them.

Adding a user's profile photo

Using our CV parsing tool to input your information, with the social proof aside to show the value of connecting to a community. 

The performance of the CV parsing tool is not significant, we investigate the data to clearly find the trend that user tend to use our CV parser, or only fill in one information. At the point, we didn't stuck in only how'd we could improve the UI and flow within the onboarding process, instead, we look back to our exercise to identify ways to engage users, in different timing and with different tactics. (Other features)

Where system thinking preparation kicks in as opportunities for our team.

We look back the product map and the three tiers information structure. We quickly decided to de-prioritize the second and third tiers of user information in the onboarding process, and take those into the second prioritized product areas. 

A in-product step by step profile completion feature

Result

After introducing launching both new onboarding process with a step-by-step profile completion experience outside of onboarding process; in total, we had a 22%+ lift on the # of completed profiles (with at least 6 items are filled). We have 1/3 of the user upload a clear profile photo.

With the foundation of more educator profiles completed, it later on facilitated the grow of the educator community in our product, the engagement among the educators (follow), and the high-quality contents contributed by the community.