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The Product

Citrine informatics 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: Generate user behavior

Citrine's intelligence platform generates insight using data submitted by material science students. However during the time of the consult, the team was struggling to motivate users to upload information organically. (As an early stage startup. they were relyaing on personal sources for content. Thus, we were asked to help answer the following question: How can citrine increase the number of users who upload research articles to Citrination.io?

My Role

I was the lead on this project. This included setting the scope of the work, creating the proposal, managing deadlines, and coordinating and communicating with the client. I also worked on UX and visual design for two concepts which were presented to the client.

The current site

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The scope - Adapting on the fly

We originally planned on activities in the following order.

User interviews to better understand motivations of users
Brainstorm multiple concepts to address gaps in current site and motivators of users
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 the right subjects to interview in time. Therefore to finish the project on time and create a significant impact, we decided to split the team into two 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: Concepts for motivation

COncept Brainstorming

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As a team, we brainstormed concept ideas to help to

Leaderboard

The goal of leaderboard was to provide a "Reward of the Tribe" (a reward to help users feel important and attractive) for users who upload articles. 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 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 and could provide immediate results. There was some internal debate about the quality of an experience like this but we decided the business need outweighs 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.

Document repository

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The goal of the document repository is generate active engagement by allowing them to share and group articles on Citrination. (Through talking to the client, we learned that material science researchers and students work in teams and are actively sharing articles and grouping articles. )

Team 2: Current site usability

User testing

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

Results

When signing up, 3/6 users tested attempted to sign in multiple times before signing up because they did not see the signup link
After signing up, 5/6 users ignored the "email confirmation required" message before attempting to sign in