User Onboarding
UX/UI/Visual Design, Front-End Code, Copy/UX Writing
Users are intimidated by long forms. When your users are high school student athletes, they're even more intimidated by long forms.
How do you collect necessary information while delighting users and getting them excited about using your product?
Break up your form into chunks. And with a younger audience, make it feel more like a fun quiz or game, one that's directly tied to the sport they're passionate about.
This design was so successful that it increased the number of new users with searchable profiles by 200%.
Customized Introductions
Students were required to provide their name and sport when they created an account. So we could use this information to customize their experience from the beginning.
I wanted athletes to feel the energy of stepping onto a basketball court to begin a big game, to feel the excitement of emerging from the tunnel onto a football field with cheering fans.
Every background image on the introduction screen was shot from the perspective of the moment when the everything is about to begin, as though the users themselves were about to compete.
Understanding Our Users
I wanted users to feel welcome and understand why they needed to give our system information. We also wanted to know how serious they were about playing sports; this would affect the kinds of colleges they would want to focus on later. (For example, very few football players will move from high school to Division I sports - but if playing is essential, they might find a place on a less competitive, smaller team.)
A progress bar always let users know where they were in the process.
Once we understood students' sports commitment level, we acknowledged this and affirmed how we could help. We also wanted to offer a branch for students to understand the college coach perspective.
Essential Information
We cut down the number of questions from the old form, reducing it by half. Onboarding only asked the most essential information, and all the other questions we used to ask as well were left for an explicitly optional section afterward.
The most important information we needed revolved around athlete stats, location, and academic standing.
Accomplishment
Users could leave the onboarding experience and dive straight into exploring the full web app, but because this information was so vital for their experience afterward, we wanted to make sure they understood what they were leaving.
Once they finished Onboarding, we congratulated them and gave them guidance and options for next steps.
Users loved this process.
