Prosper
Prosper is a digital referral marketing platform that mimics word-of-mouth marketing.
I was brought onto the Prosper team as a digital product designer and kind of fell into a design strategy and consultation role. When I joined the team, the product was three-page dashboard with limited features and inconsistent branding. The founders wanted to improve the user journey and increase brand awareness. For a couple of months, we were heads-down focused on re-energizing and expanding the product.
Before doing any work, I wanted to research some of the competitors and even look into future opportunities, since digital marketing is becoming more relevant. After looking into the current market, I met with the current Prosper team to gain insight on their wants and needs. We used those insights to re-design the brand and dashboard, just to ensure consistency. This entailed re-designing the website, dashboard, and widget. After setting the standard with everything current, we wanted to focus on new features and improvements. We decided that the next focus would be a widget wizard, teams dashboard page, and reports dashboard page.
Prosper uses React or Chakra components on their dashboard and widgets.
Voucherify
I enjoyed the tech-based approach and educational resource that Voucherify provides. It was also showing that their referral program was an expansion of their current product rather than their starting point. I found that this was a strength of Prosper being able to focus all their efforts on being the best referral program rather than just another product line. Voucherify is also both consumer and enterprise.
ReferralRock
It shows that ReferralRock has many automations, making it much easier on the user and on the back-end. Unlike Prosper, ReferralRock is negating the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Prosper's potential with utilizing multiple marketing channels is untapped.
We conducted a remote, digital workshop with the Prosper team, which was aimed at understanding the current product and what our focus should be on. We asked questions regarding company identification, the current product, and the future product. We gained some really great insights regarding many instances, as shown in the screenshot above. I conducted an affinity map with the answers provided and found more important thoughts and ideas. The color shows each team member's responses and the stroke outline shows that more than one individual stated that thought. We focused our future efforts on the categories from our affinity map.
One of my first official tasks was to analyze Prosper's website and suggest updates or enhancements. I went through and made smaller edits directly in Webflow, then suggested larger changes via mock-ups in Figma. Once approved by the founders, I made the large-scale changes to the website. We focused on ensuring the user journey. It was important for us to identify two key user personas and perfecting their journey on the website. We clearly defined distinct steps that each persona would view.
**Changes have been made to the website since then.
One of the newest feature for Prosper's product is the added ability to visually see the widget that you are creating while you are creating it. The referral widget is a pretty tedious task for users to create because each step needs some sort of user testing. It was important that the process was streamlined and simple so that the user is not overwhelmed. We also needed to weigh complex creation with customizability. We found that this was more difficult and still needs testing on the back-end. Previously, users had to manually code the widget themselves or set these values individually.
Users did not have the ability to add their team to the company's Prosper dashboard, which is concerning when most companies are more than one person. We mimicked this dashboard page on most Teams dashboards. We wanted to ensure that the host account would be able to edit role responsibilities for their employees and their access. Obviously, this would be customizable based on the company's product. This page is fairly standard.
The newest dashboard update was a page that displayed metrics for certain widgets or campaigns, in general. I did some user research on important metrics that companies would need in the instance of creating widgets or campaigns. We narrowed down exactly what our user's would find essential in their day-to-day business marketing operations. Again, for ease of development, I used Chakra components (minus the calendar) to design this page.
After focusing on current design needs and development, we started thinking about opportunity areas. We also placed prevalence on a future product roadmap.
