Expert360

Revamping the Profile Creation flow — 2019

Expert360 is an online talent marketplace - We connect the world's top consultants with the world's most interesting companies.

Revamping the Profile Creation flow

The expert profile creation flow is an integral experience to our experts, but it is one that drives many of them away from us. It is used by new experts to create their profile and is their first introduction to our platform. It’s also used by existing experts to make updates to their profile. This page is used quite regularly but has a number of problems. Beyond technical bugs, the profile builder is also a subpar product right now as it is slow and difficult to fill in. This product has served us well, but in order to bring us in line with our competition, it needs some quality of life improvements.

The profile builder was first implemented about 6 years ago and has seen minor updates since then. This page is slow, follows a different design language than all of our other pages, and is very challenging to make updates to.

There’s a large list of problems that experts raise regularly in feedback such as:

  • Can't view projects before investing a significant amount of time in building the profile
  • Slow vetting process
  • Not sure how our profile differs from LinkedIn’s profile
  • It takes a really long time to build our profile, especially because much of the information we require is the same as what is captured by LinkedIn.
  • Our profile builder usability is significantly worse than our competitors.

To put things in perspective, only 36 Experts out of the 100 who created an account end up creating a minimal profile

perspective copyperspective copy

As you can see, only 36% of experts who create an account make even a minimal profile, and 24% create a profile that we deem acceptable. Less than a quarter of experts who sign up build an acceptable profile. We hope that by revamping our profile builder we’ll be able to improve these numbers significantly.

Success metric: Activation

Help more users to move through the loop and create their profile. 

User Journey Map

When we map the user's journey we can put them at the center of our solutions, we can tell their story to the team or other decision-makers in a visual and complete way. This map helps us synchronize touchpoints so that the user experience with our product or service is more harmonious.

Expert360 User Journey Map: Profile Creation

user-journeyuser-journey

Main Pain Points

1 Profile build is tedious and unfriendly 

  • Confusing navigation
  • First-time profile build takes too much time
  • Way too many fields/ information
  • No awareness of steps to complete 


2 Adding work history is hard work

  • Adding a new company is too much work
  • Not clear what is required vs what is optional

 

3 Not sure how profile looks like after first-time profile completion

4 No clear sense of next steps after first-time profile completion

Lo-fi Ideas

After grouping all feedback from our users we started to outline some ideas to validate our assumptions and also work with developers to get an idea of the implementation time of each feature.

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A/B results

% of Experts who start to build their profile after being vetted: 
From ~78% to 95%

% Experts who added at least one work item:
From 76% to 82%

High fidelity Prototype

Professional-summaryProfessional-summary
work experience 01 copy 7work experience 01 copy 7
work experience 01 copy 9work experience 01 copy 9
work experience 01 copy 4work experience 01 copy 4
work experience 01 copy 8work experience 01 copy 8
profile previewprofile preview
Group 7Group 7