The Product 

Citrine informatics (a StartX company) is a data analytics platform tailored to material development, selection, and sales. It helps material development teams reduce cost, time, and risk associated with materials R&D and manufacturing. 

The Challenge: Increase the number of user uploads 

Citrine's intelligence platform generates insight using data submitted by material science students and professors. During the time of the consult, the team was struggling to motivate users to upload information organically. Thus, we were asked to help answer the following question:  How might we increase the number of users who upload research articles to Citrination.io?

My Role

 As project lead, I set the scope of the work, created the proposal, managed deadlines, and coordinated and communicated with the client. I also worked on UX and visual design for 2 concepts that were presented to the client.  

The scope - Adapting on the fly 

We originally planned on doing the following:

  1. Research - User interviews to better understand motivations of users 
  2. Ideate - Brainstorm multiple concepts to address gaps between current site and motivators of users 
  3. Prototype - Create low fidelity prototypes; narrow down concepts, and present high fidelity designs to the client.

However midway through the project, it become clear we were not going to find enough material science PhD students in time. Therefore to finish the project on time and create a significant impact, we decided to split the team into 2 teams: one team to work on usability of the existing site and one team to design concepts to motivate users to upload data.  

 

Team 1: Current Site usability

 

User testing: Problems Noticed 

Team members observed 6 users go through the onboarding of the current site and and noticed 2 significant problems with process:  

 

1. Difficulty finding sign uP Link

When signing up, users (3 out of 6) tested attempted to sign in multiple times before signing up because they did not see the signup link text

 

2.  Confusion about email confirmation 

After signing up, users (5 out of 6) ignored the "email confirmation required" message before attempting to sign in and were denied access on average of 3 times each before realizing they need to confirm before logging in



REDesign recommendations


Delay Email confirmation until necessary 

We recommended delaying the email confirmation until Citrine absolutely needs user data.  In this case, it's when the user upload document.  This way, the largest source of friction is delayed until a user has invested some time understanding Citrination and will be less likely to drop off.  

 

 

Increase sign up CTA prominence

We recommended that Citrine make the sign up view prominent and link to the sign in page rather than the other way around. 

 

 

Increase "confirmation required" Prominence  

Since users completely missed the confirmation required message and users cannot proceed without confirming, this message should be more prominent.  

 

Team 2: New Features 

 

CONCEPT BRAINSTORMING 

 

As a team, we brainstormed product and feature ideas that might lead users to upload data. After a few short brainstorming sessions, we prioritized the ideas based on impact to the user, impact to the business, and perceived difficulty to implement.  Based on this, we decided turn the following 2 ideas into high-fidelity concepts. 

 

LEADERBOARD 

The goal of leaderboard was to provide a "Reward of the Tribe" (from Nir Eyal's Hooked Model), for users who upload articles.  This is a reward to help users feel important and attractive to others, 

The dashboard highlighted:

  • Users who uploaded recently: To provide an immediate reward to all users who upload
  • Top contributors: To motivate users to upload a large quantity of documents

 

REMINDER WIDGET

The goal of the reminder widget is simple: provide a gentle reminder to users about the importance of uploading content to the site. It's a solution that can be implemented relatively quickly with the potential to provide immediate results.  There was some internal debate about the quality of an experience like this, but we decided the business need outweighed any temporary discomfort this may cause the users and that this view would only be shown a few times a year and to users who have not uploaded data.  

 

Next Steps

We recommended that Citrine live test the reminder widget and leaderboard separately and implement them if either results in a positive change in the number of users who upload data. We also recommended that Citrine launch the usability redesign recommendations and closely monitor number of new registered users and number of unique visitors.