Personal Development Platform

When it comes to mastering the art of living, everyone is the target audience. With thousands of hours of video and audio material, countless articles, quotes, stories, and 100+ different topics, how do you serve up the right piece of content that resonates with the user?

We’ve discovered that people respond more to messages that speak to their immediate emotional needs, which often revolved around the “big” problem and longings in their lives. By identifying these problems, we were able to craft entry points and create a progressive disclosure map of topics of increasing complexity that enticed users to want more of the content.

Project Summary: We knew from the beginning that for a project such as this, we needed to become our users by submerging ourselves in the soul-searching quest for growth and self-knowledge (it’s good to be open minded in all things). We’ve traveled to the company’s headquarters in beautiful eastern Oregon, a place that is part spiritual retreat and part school of thought. We’ve spend several days doing discovery workshops and getting to know the breadth and depth of the existing content. There were many users on site and it was easy to get some informal interviews as they were visiting for weekend-long workshops. We’ve had a chance to watch them interact with an existing websites and the major pain point surfaced quickly, which was a question “Where do I begin?”

With an ocean of information present on the site, many users perused content, skipping over pieces they perceived irrelevant (or getting overwhelmed and leaving), until they finally hit a jackpot and spent the next half hour glued to the screen. And then again, back to browsing and skipping. After further interviews with the user, we came up with a two step funnel to getting users the right piece of content. Those steps were a) mindset (heal, seek, grow) and b) topics (dealing with loss, money problems, etc….). Once the mindset was determined, the website would keep them in that “universe” by personalizing their content serving and showing only those topics that related to the context. Beyond that, the idea was, through the progressive disclosure of more advanced teachings, to convert the users into a “student” and have them enroll in the online school.

The end product was a massive platform that was part content library, eCommerce store, and an online classroom/learning platform.

Role: UX Lead

Deliverables: Archetypes, concept diagrams, content strategy, wireframes

Activities: Contextual inquiry, stakeholder interviews, discovery workshops