Next steps cards

Guild provides education benefits to big-name companies so their employees can go back to school for low or no tuition.

Enrollment processes are complicated and vary from school to school, and from one funding method to another.

Without personalized guidance, users stuggled to get enrolled and start school. They were turning to member support services in large numbers.

I worked with the project designer to develop user journey maps for each persona and funding type.

Then we interviewed product owners, members services specialists, and others to identify unique user needs at each step.

I added actions, target emotions, and helpful resources for each step. Then I generated a draft for each step.

Guild’s old next step cards provided sparse, boilerplate information. Click the image to enlarge.

We learned that users wanted to see multiple steps at once, versus one at a time.

Users wanted to see a larger number of defined “chunks” of tasks.

Users wanted clear visibility on the road ahead. A majority preferred to see six steps at once rather than less.

Click the image to enlarge.

Due to UI and engineering considerations, we needed to change some of our design choices:

The extra content I’d crafted to help us hit emotional targets would have to be pulled back.
The maximum number of steps per view needed to be reduced from six to four.

Click the image to enlarge.

The completed Next Steps cards feature clear, actionable, personalized descriptions for each step.

But they also show:

strong CTAs in card titles and on buttons
time-tags on each step to help the user gauge urgency
validated copy that balances between informing users and motivating them to action

Click the image to enlarge.