Onboarding

Overhauling 99designs' designer onboarding experience

The designer community is 99designs’ greatest asset. Over the past 10 years 99d has invested in building a professional design community. An example of that investment is the creation of a Curation team—a team dedicated to ranking, sorting, banning, and promoting designers.

Before launching this project, 99d was open to any designer—which was pretty great. It gave everyone an opportunity to "make it" in design.

Onboarding - Old flow — Old flow (1. Sign-up → 2. Optionally fill out some information → 3. Start working)

But this also meant that we didn't know anything about these designers until they started work on our platform.

Unfortunately, most of the designers who sign up are banned due to the low-quality work they produce. This project aimed to expedite the progression for qualified designers while identifying and blocking the bad actors who don't contribute positively to our community.

Introducing Designer Onboarding

A fundamental shift in how designers join 99d, this new onboarding process will guide designers towards success and improve the quality of our design community.

Here's what we shipped:

Onboarding - Getting Started — Designers are prompted to provide us details about themselves through an application after sign-up

Onboarding - Account Settings — Details are provided through their account settings

Onboarding - Application progress indicator — Application progress indicator guiding designers throughout the process

Onboarding - Hypotheses Generation Chart — Snapshot of the hypotheses generation worksheet I used in our workshop

Onboarding - Engineers — Hypotheses activity with our engineers

Onboarding - Application qualifications — Snapshot of the data that the Curation team needs from designers to determine who's qualified to join

Onboarding - A New Process — A new onboarding process... shout-out to Whimsical

Onboarding - Welcome Page — Welcome page

Onboarding - Form Details — Form details

Onboarding - Second Iteration — Re-using existing components such as the progress bar and form fields

Onboarding - Flow Illustration — Going back and forth between the Getting started page and the account settings

Onboarding - Contest Brief Indicator — Existing contest brief indicator component

Onboarding - Application Progress Indicator States — A few of the application progress indicator states

Onboarding - UX Considerations — UX considerations for the limitations we've defined

Onboarding - Alert Bar — Alert bar explaining why an unreviewed designer cannot join the contest

Onboarding - Material — Using Material's components

Onboarding - New Flow — High-level, the flow looked like this

Onboarding - ID Verifications — Chart illustrating the drop in the number of verification attempts

Onboarding - Designer quality — Chart illustrating the increase in our designer quality

Onboarding - Meaningful actions — Chart illustrating comparison between old and new cohorts in performing a meaningful action

Community reception

We also received an overwhelming amount of support and gratitude after announcing this new onboarding process in our designer community forum. Existing designers welcomed this change as it meant they wouldn't have to compete with low-quality designers again.

Onboarding - Community Response — A snapshot of the comments we received from our community

"Oh, this is very cool! I suffered a couple of times from unscrupulous designers. Now there is hope to avoid this. Thank you so much!" — Konstantin_Kostenko

"It is great to read this. More quality in term of ideas and education. This is going to put the bar a little higher." — AdrianKg

"Best platform forever." — tanlearn

Onboarding - Negative Reception — Some negative responses

SamToday at 5:33 PM

Hi! I'm Sam. Feel free to ask me anything about my background, projects, or interests.

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