Pralent
Summer Internship: Re-designing for Optimized Experiences to Obtain Real-world Skills.
OVERVIEW
Pralent is a seed startup in the E-learning industry aiming to bridge the gap between businessess and students in helping students building up and showcasing real-world skills.
During the summer of 2020, I worked as a Product and Design Strategy intern at Pralent. During my 10-week internship, I was responsible for pressure testing and optimizing the platform to reduce the high churn rate and increase high-engagement new users.
MY ROLE
Design Strategist, Evaluative UX Research, Product Management
TIMELINE
Summer 2020, 10 weeks
STAKEHOLDERS
Executive Managers, Developers, Business Clients, Organizational Partners, E-learning Users
01 The Problem
High churn rate, high bounce rate, few active users
When I joined the team, Pralent had been launched for more than a year. However, the traffic data weren't showing a promising reflection of the platform's effort in creating quality interactions between businesses and students. There were 3 major indicators that are on my radar.
Bounce Rate
Ideally, users join Pralent by signing up and creating a profile that can reflect their real-world skillsets. I saw a particularly high bounce rate during the profile creating process. 60%+ users bounced off the platform before completing their profile creation.
Churn Rate
Even after successfully registering and creating the profile, around 1/3 of the users do not come back to the platform again, causing a significant churn rate.
Engagement/Active Users
Looking into the actual users of Pralent, both daily active users (DAU) and time spent per DAU are low. Most registered users do not update profiles, post projects, or participate in challenges.
02 Research to Find Out Why
Evaluative user research to learn from users why/how Pralent is not satisfying their needs.
Given that Pralent is delivered based on users’ need (rigorous exploratory user research were conducted before the product launched), why aren’t user using Pralent as expected? To find out, I perform a series of user research to evaluate and pressure test the current solution.
Questions Tasked to be Answered
1. Why do people use Pralent? (What is the value proposition of Pralent?”)
2. Why do people start and churn? (What are the frictions or gaps between expectations and Pralent?)
Research Plan
03 Insights
Ambiguous focus, unclear information architecture, habitual differences.
INSIGHT 1
Misleading Information Architecture
Users were difficult to complete tasks on Pralent due to the lack of clarity on Pralent.
There are users of two sides on Pralent, organizational users (such as business employers) and E-learining users (such as students). The sided information were complex and mixed up on Pralent, so that users from either side found it difficult to find the categories and complete their tasks.
INSIGHT 2
Lack of Focus
Pralent aimed to provide opportunities for job seekers to build up and showcase real world skills, and thus strengthen the connections between employers and job seekers. With the aim, Pralent provided multiple features to help reach the goal.
Although each individual feature solves users' problem, users found these features confusing as a whole and overlapping with some of the other popular recruiting alternatives.
INSIGHT 3
Contradicting Users' Existing Habits
Users have their existing habit in recruiting. In particular, employers are used to utilize existing solutions to recruit talent. They did not see the value of learning to use a new platform with simply better integration.
Job-seeking users mostly bounce off because they don't perceive the high commitment in creating profile worth the value they would obtain from Pralent.
04 Re-design Pralent
Re-design Pralent solving the problems that hamper users from using Pralent as a solution.
01
Foucs on the Core Value
Business Sponsored Challenges
Well-designed challenges and competitons sponsored by businesses, bringing real world problem to participate.
Challenge Profile
Building up profile as a challenge participants, providing rewarding motivations for users to build up profiles.
Leveraging Existing Habits
Promote business sponsored challenges as a compliment to users' recruiting profile so that users are not doing overlapping work on multiple platforms.
02
Clarity for both sides
Engage Both Sides
Clearly convey the core value of Pralent on the landing page.
Separate Information Messages
Organizational users and job-seeking users will be guided to different pages and see separate category menus.
05 Metrics for Evaluation
Metrics for A/B Testing and new designed Pralent platform.
Daily active user (DAU)
Time spent per DAU
Daily sessions per DAU
Churn rate
Bounce Rate
Task efficiency (Time spent to complete a task)
Task effectiveness (Success rate of completing a task)