Stay Nimble

2018

This was a 2 week sprint design process to help Stay Nimble, a career coaching digital platform, test their new onboarding and MVP and help them define next-steps for their product. Through user testing and interviews we redefined the scope and worked on their entire user flow.

Client project @ General Assembly with Cindy Chen, Romain Coste and Ibby Dalrymple

Opportunity

Stay Nimble is a UK Certified Social Enterprise start up founded in 2017 by Dominic Atkinson. Its mission is to create a digital platform to make career coaching — a service that currently exclude large parts of society due to cost — available to a wider audience.

They help users discover new career possibilities and through a program of exercises and tasks, develop the necessary skills to pursue them.

The brief asked our team to test their current MVP, launched in March 2018, and try to identify new possible features and opportunities.

User interviews
& testing

Through a previously conducted market research Stay Nimble had already defined an initial focus group that consisted of women, aged 22 to 44, looking for personal improvement. Understanding how this platform could have a much broader audience and social impact, we sent out a screening survey to find prospects belonging to different groups.

We interviewed and tested with 16 out of the 71 survey respondents, and 3 active users.

An affinity mapping revelead us a lot of patterns,
some of them confirming our initial assumptions:

We wanted to create the biggest impact with the minimum effort, as we only had one 2 weeks sprint.

After sharing this findings with stakeholders, we agreed on changing the initial scope to, instead of working on possible new features, restructure and improve on the current user flow.

Ideation

To get everyone thinking toward the same goal we created our persona: Jane is a 28 years old woman who lives and works in London, in the Advertising world. Due to late hours and a stressful life, she’s looking for a career change. To achieve that Jane needs guidance and support so she is confident and prepared to progress in her career.

Workshop &
Design Studio

To understand how we could create a homepage that would clearly convey to Jane what Stay Nimble could do to help her, we ran a workshop with stakeholders.

We used three different tools: a word storming exercise, where we asked participants to: describe in a few words per post-it what do you want your users to understand, feel, think, experience when they think of Stay Nimble.

An affinity mapping, where we grouped and named the trends found: Trust & Support, Inspiration, Sense of community, Feeling of achievement, easiness of use, Tools & Process.

A Crazy 8, where we gave participants 5 minutes to come up with 6 to 8 ideas for the homepage to meet these goals.

After a round of voting, the homepage should:

1. Explain the SN coaching process

2. Clearly show the product.

3. Show who can benefit.

Prototyping
& Testing

Apart from the homepage, we proposed two major changes to the user flow:

1. the sign up form becoming a separate page and
2. the tests being incorporated to the product.

With this we expected to offer a quicker signup and add more value to the actual product, as users really valued the tests results. We set out to test and iterate on our solutions:

Visual Design

SN currently uses two different visual languages. A homepage focused on sports images, black and yellow. And a product with smoother pastel colors and graphic elements. We followed with the latter which creates a soother experience and avoids the perception of a sports/travel website.

Still, we wanted to convey the idea that changing careers is a journey and – why not? – an adventure.

To create a warmer feel we added hand drawn assets, as many interviewees mentioned that career coaching is a very personal process.

Moodboard

Styleguide

Our solution

Our final design aims to help Jane – our young stressed advertising agency worker persona – find out about how Stay Nimble could help her change careers and get her to quickly start using the platform.

Click image to go to prototype 👆

Next Steps
& Results

To create even more confidence and trust in users we would like to create an About Us page, talking about Stay Nimble’s team and partners. And also showcase true stories of Stay Nimble’s users.

For their product we suggest bringing the tests inside their platform to have consistent branding and clear indication of progress, as shown in the prototype.

Stay Nimble’s team embraced the results of our research and design sprint and understood how a few changes to their flow could have a big impact in attracting more users and offering more to the current ones.

Our work will be implemented during the year of 2019.