UrbanLeap is an e-Procurement platform for public agencies. I created the MVP in 2020 and am the only designer on the team.

The team saw many first-time users who didn’t understand what to do next after they created a project. The first project is critical in convincing users that their procurement outcomes would improve on UrbanLeap. It was crucial for our North Star metric, the total number of projects on the platform. We needed to increase the number of projects to get funding.

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TDLR; we needed users to understand how to use the platform so that they could continue creating projects.

My Role

Only product designer.
Responsible for end to end design.

My Team

1 Product Manager (PM)
2 Engineers (Eng)

Duration

4 weeks
from initiation to implementation

Problem

How do we help our users have a great first experience on the platform when they don’t know how to use it?

outcome

The goal for this sprint was to increase comprehension of the product. We measured this by looking at:

- The average # of communications with Customer Success (CS) team by 50% (currently 11 emails)

- Feature usage

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We were successful in meeting our goal. We reduced communications to 5 emails, and data indicated that users leveraged this feature to help them understand the following parts of the process.

Research

Users were confused because the way they created solicitations was different.

We first had to understand what was confusing. After surveying all communications with the CS team and grouping them, the Product Manager and I found four themes.

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Most of the themes focused on a specific workflow, the "Develop" phase of the product. This made sense as (1) most of the users aren't procurement experts, and (2) this phase is fluid, unlike the others.

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The typical UrbanLeap user. They are not procurement experts.

After a team brainstorming, the solution the Product Manager and I moved forward with was a checklist. The checklist wouldn't work in isolation; it needed to supplement existing email and in-app notifications. Working closely with the CS & eng teams, we revamped all existing emails and in-app messages in conjunction with this sprint.

Significant iterations

I iterated to be more intentional and to provide clarity.

I wanted to keep the following considerations in mind for this design:

- Procurement isn’t that much fun

- We want to encourage the users to keep going

- We wanted it to feel approachable & friendly

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I interviewed & tested 8 people. Based on their feedback, I made the following 3 big changes:

Outcomes & Learnings

There's always room for improvement.

We were successful in meeting our product goals for this sprint.
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Here are a couple of things I'd do next time:
- The PM and I didn't realize how big this sprint was for the Eng team. They broke it down into three parts, taking longer than expected to deliver. Had we known this, we could have split the work up ahead of time
- I'd like to figure out some way we could incorporate a timeline
- Add bespoke checklists

Project clarity for first time users