Increasing user acquisition and engagement through understanding user needs
Building TribeX's developer community platform
Platform
Client
Mobile Webapp
Date
2023
Role
UX Researcher
UI Designer
01
Overview
ONBOARD'S PRODUCT VISION
Onboard is a community onboarding platform for developers and community managers. It allows community managers to grow, engage and scale their community.
Onboard allows community managers to design gamified tasks such as quests for developers to complete and earn rewards.
The platform serves as a library of communities which allow developers to discover and join new communities, and keep them active and engaged in the wider developer space.
Investigating Onboard's relationship with its users
02
The Challenge
The challenge we face lies in implementing Onboard's quest-based gamified approach, which remains largely untested among our target users. While similar concepts have seen success with competitors like Zealy.io in the Web3 sphere, its appeal to Web2 or broader developer communities remains uncertain.
As the UX team, our task is to delve into the needs of Onboard's target users and devise strategies to enhance user acquisition and engagement through feature development.
03
Research Objectives
Community managers
Understand the challenges
COMMUNITY MANAGERS face in acquiring and engaging new users.
How?
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Understand how community managers grow their communities.
Understand the current pain points in managing developer communities, particularly on how they onboard new users.
Understand their needs & wishes for the platform they are using to manage their community
Developers
Identify the factors that can
attract & retain active
DEVELOPERS in a community.
How?
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Understand the pain points or frustrations in being a community member (either around onboarding or active participation)
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Understand what would motivate them to join a community and participate actively
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Understand the current user journey of finding and joining a community
OVERALL
Validate the usefulness of an onboarding platform to help community growth and increase community engagement
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we better understand the needs and goals of developers and community managers, so as to effectively attract and engage these users, while ensuring that the platform, Onboard, adequately meets user's needs.
04-1
Key Insights
FROM COMMUNITY MANAGERS
SEGMENTATION & CATEGORISATION tools are important for community managers to target appropriate community members (for events, announcements, etc)
✏️ SEGMENTATION & CATEGORISATION
TRAFFIC to attract new & existing members are normally limited to word-of-mouth, and certain social media platforms.
👄 WORD OF MOUTH
Community managers currently using a myriad of platforms for differing functions:
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Event management
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User data collection
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Building community
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Generating traffic
📢 MULTITUDE OF TOOLS
Having a PERSONALISED HUMAN TOUCH to embrace new community members adds greatly to the overall onboarding experience, to make new members feel seen and valued.
👋 HUMAN INTERACTION MATTERS
04-2
Key Insights
FROM DEVELOPERS
Developers join communities mainly for opportunities to increase their LEARNING, get better at their SKILLS, and
expand NETWORK.
💪 MOTIVATIONS
Different developers thrive in different types of learning environments. Lack of support for DIFFERENT LEARNING
STAGES / PACES may hurt new users.
📚 LEARNING STYLES
Word-of-mouth is the current go-to way of recommending communities, which is a slow process. A PANORAMIC VIEW
of existing communities is lacking.
👄 WORD OF MOUTH
Current forms of onboarding via landing pages i.e. Discord, are often intimidating, dismissed or skipped out in the sea of onboarding messages.
⚠️ INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Re-looking Onboard's relationship with its users after analyzing key insights
05
Research Methods
Competitive Analysis
As Onboard is still in the early stages of product development, we wanted to better understand how it fits into the market. We conducted industry research on prominent players in the community building industry and analogous sectors, in order to understand why they are successful, mistakes to avoid and identify opportunities for differentiation, improvement and innovation within the field of developer communities.
SWOT Analysis
Using the insights gathered from the competitive, we identified the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats or risks linked with pursuing a community onboarding platform for developers and community managers.
User Surveys
Additionally, we explored the digital platforms that these individuals use in relation to discovering, joining and managing community platforms, aiming to identify specific features and functions that they found most value in.
User Interviews
I interviewed 6 individuals for the project to gain deep insights into their experiences and challenges about developer communities.
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Affinity Mapping
We then noted down all observations from the user interviews (separating devs & community managers into 2 colours) and briefly categorized them into main aspects of interactions within a community, i.e. joining, onboarding, engaging, managing, growing and attitudes towards communities. This helped us to synthesize our key insights from the user interviews.
Empathy Mapping
Empathy mapping allows us to gather insights into what users think, feel, say, and do. By understanding users' motivations, pain points, and desires, we can improve Onboard so that it meet users actual needs.
User Personas
From our empathy map, we developed 3 distinct user personas: 1 community manager and 2 developers as representations of potential key audience segments for Onboard.
06
Design Solutions
USER FLOW
Taking into consideration the key insights we discovered during our research phase, we proposed the following user flow for devs joining Onboard, paying attention to sorting new users based on their skill level so that quests provided are personalised and relevant to each new user. User retention is also optimised through retention loops that incentivises members to contribute back into the community.
Proposed user flow diagram
07
UI Design
Based on the above user flow as well as key insights derived from our research phase, I created the following UI screens to better illustrate key interaction moments.
'Get Started' Page
The get started page was designed with the following in mind: making new users feel comfortable, informed and excited about the oncoming app experience.
Gathering User Data
Our research has revealed that community managers want to better segment and categorize their users so that they can better target the appropriate audience. Hence understanding dev needs and motivations are important.
Library of communities
Onboard aims to serve as the 'library' for devs to find their community. Hence, an easy and intuitive way for users to search up communities is vital. This can also be supported by having a panoramic view of communities right from the landing page.
Quests & Rewards
By tapping into the psychology of rewards, achievements and challenges, 'Level Up" pages encourages users engagement by infusing a sense of purpose and progression.
08
Retrospective
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In this project which served as Tribe's product discovery phase for Onboard, the focus was on understanding the needs and goals of the users, as well as identifying the key challenges and opportunities for Onboard as a product. This reduces the risks around what the team eventually decides to build, by prioritizing product features that addresses real user problems.
Below are some further considerations and limitations to our research we have identified after completing this project:
The community managers we interviewed were all Web3 managers. Gamification seems to work well for Web 3 communities based on interviews. However, we need to be more aware of needs & goals of Web2 developers communities, and see whether gamification will work well with that.
During user interviews, we could have asked more open-ended questions, such as: "What is the meaning of a community to you?" (For developers) This reveals what users are looking for in a community (i.e. sense of belonging, ability to learn, etc)
"What are the values that are important to your community?" (For community managers) This reveals what managers want to achieve in their community and therefore what features will enable this (i.e. personal touch, openness to sharing)
While Zealy attracts users based on prospect of earning NFTs, i.e. incentive-based traffic, Onboard's Web2 target users may not come for the same prospects as our research has shown that Web2 users have different incentives, such as working on projects, learning opportunities, networking. Quests and mission based incentives may work for Zealy's Web3 audience but not necessarily for Onboard's Web2 audience.