Sponsor Circle Inc. is a Toronto based organization that aims to connect Brands (e.g. Coca cola) with Properties (e.g. Coachella) via their web-based portal, in order to create new sponsorship opportunities for small-medium sized businesses. The organization also caters to agencies that can work on the behalf either Brands or Properties. As such, Sponsor Circle has three major users; Brands, Properties & Agencies.
Through an in-depth analysis of our database, we were able to determine that we had a large number of members signed up within our portal who did not have a complete profile. Moreover, it seemed that users would sign-up but only visit the portal 2-3 times without making any matches.
To discover the problem from a user perspective, user interviews & a competitive analysis was necessary. We wanted to discover what/if anything first interested them about SponsorCircle, what/if anything would make them visit again and what/if anything made them lose interest.
Users from the platform were reached out at random in order to conduct user interviews.
We were aware that the 2 types of giants in the sponsoring world were: sports sponsorships & influencers. As a result, although our brand does not facilitate sponsorship for influencers, the 4 competitors we chose were 2 of the popular sports sponsorship portals (direct competitors) and 2 of the influencer sponsorship portals (indirect competitors).
Due to the time constraint for this project, our ideal solution was leaning towards option #2. Our reasoning during this step is as follows:
The core motives for Brands & Agencies representing Brands were found to be similar. The same could be said for the Properties & Agencies representing Properties. The below diagram explains this further.
Our goal with this journey map was not only to analyze major pain points for each user but also identify similarities between agencies and brands/properties! Although each users motivations are different, pain points we found were similar for their agency counterparts!
works with mid-tier sports team
Responsible for generating sponsorship opportunities with brands for sports season
"I feel like it takes forever to even begin finding a sponsorship opportunity"
works within an agency and her current client is looking for brands to sponsor
works on multiple projects at one time
"Finding sponsorships always takes too long and often up with zero results, so my team leans on other forms of advertising!"
works on user engagement and building brand awareness
Creative mind behind a lot of global marketing campaigns
"I am constantly trying to tune in to what our [brand name]'s audience is engaging in, so that I can create opportunities to have the brand engage with them authentically - where they are already"
Using various medias to advertise her assigned brands
Finds and keeps track of new leads
"I want to foster sponsorships that actually have an impact for our clients in the long run! Something memorable!"
OUR HMW
How might we guide users during the sign-up process to help them create more robust profiles and find the most compatible match for their needs each time they log into their portal?
Information is missing from profiles, which causes there to be less interested for new users to stay on the platform - which results in more incomplete profiles. So guiding users to completing profiles is essential - but one major question we had as a team was: What information is the most essential for a viable profile!
Due to the large number of information for a robust profile we needed to categorize the info to determine what is absolutely neccessary. By only asking for the necessary information, we can ensure the sign up process is not lengthy.
The question we asked ourselves as we ideated on the creation of a more robust sign up process...how can we get this information in our sign up process without making the process tedious and overwhelming new potential users during this process?
However, more user information was needed (as we had discovered when we categorized all the information above) for a robust profile; one with the highest possibility of making matches.
As a result, we went back to doing some competitive analysis.
Our team was interested in how other platforms completed user profiles past the sign-up process.
A competitive analysis was performed with SponsorCircle's indirect competitors. The user flow that had the most impact in team discussions was Linkedin. Providing a checklist, success incentives, & consistent reminders were all ways they encouraged their users to complete their profiles!
The following images are depictions of the live onboarding created as a result of this sprint. The two main avenues for our solution are depicted below.
63% of users that are now on the website, have reached an intermediate level of profile strength (86%), increasing their chances of making a compatible match.
I chose to showcase this sprint as a case study because it was my first end to end project that illustrated both my experience with a local business and my design thinking as the sole UX designer on the project.
This sprint helped see the heuristics in practice. When trying to create a sign in process that requires a bit more information from the user, keeping the them informed about why the profile creation process was prolonged can help mitigate any frustration. The addition of the system status given to the sign process via the second iteration - also reinforces this concept of keeping users informed. This feature provides them with a checklist of things that need to be completed for a robust profile.
As this sprint represents my earlier time as a UX designer, I can say tha this was my first taste of how non-linear the design process can be. Nonetheless, it seems like the backbone of the process was the initial and final research/testing stage. Validation and feedback help drive further iterations of the product.
Now that we have the data from our users that is the most important to make a robust profile - which information would a browsing user deem the most important and thus want to see in the profile cards they find on their dashboard. Which information would they want to see immediately accessible within a profile landing page? Doing further research can help us with further speeding up this browsing experience.
More consistent information across different profiles can help us with creating useful & new filters, which in turn could possibly help browsing users funnel to their ideal candidate faster. We would want our users searching for a match to feel like a they are using a powerful search engine when trying to find optimal connections. Having each profile be complete can help us in this endeavour.
Providing users with the ability to see their profile’s site sessions and how many people viewed their contact information or downloaded their brand guideline can better inform them about where they may need to make improvements to help stand out as possible matches in this portal!