Case Study

MyTotem

Redesigning The Onboarding Experience of an AI-Powered graphic generator

MyTotem is an AI-powered social media graphic generator that creates fresh designs every month unique to their subscribers. With a data-driven design algorithm, MyTotem gets to know their users with a short onboarding survey so that they may deliver personalized social media assets that stand out among the competition.

Our mission? Help MyTotem reduce confusion around their services and deliverables, decrease the high user bounce rate, and enhance MyTotem’s overall user flow.

The Challenge
Make a delightful onboarding process that keeps users engaged and coming back for more.

The Outcome
We redesigned MyTotem’s onboarding process from the ground up, creating a highly-effective website that helps educate leads, convert customers, and maintain consistent users.

My Role
I worked closely with my team to ensure design quality standards and to identify user needs and visuals. Though my main focus was design, I played key roles in user interviews, synthesizing research, and writing the new copy for MyTotem.

Scope of Project

User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Copywriting

Teammates

Tylean Coleman
Christian Pirnie

Timeline

Three-week sprint, Sept 2020

Creating a Strategy

My team and I met up with CEO & Founder Ashley Richardson at MyTotem, to better understand the challenges her business faced converting new leads into customers. In the process, she informed us of the needs and goals of her business and what success looks like to her. This meeting helped us define clear goals and deliverables for MyTotem’s redesign.

MyTotem's original home page.

Understanding the Users

MyTotem’s goal is to help small businesses create social media graphics, easily and effortlessly. To help us define our target audience, we interviewed potential and current users. From those interviews, we created two unique personas to represent our ideal users. This painted a clear picture of our user’s profile, needs, and wants.

Creating a Promise

Our users who had attempted to create social media graphics without MyTotem brought up three major pain points. They didn’t have the time to create new graphics, it took too much brainpower to learn new skills, and it cost way too much to hire a professional to take care of it for them. This helped us define MyTotem’s promise, to save users time, money, and effort.

Exploration & Ideation

Early in our process, our team ran competitive and comparative analysis on sites in the same niche, as well as related features. The insights gained from this influenced the structure, flow, and features of MyTotem’s site.

We knew changing the structure was important but we were also aware that we cannot have good UI without good substance. We needed to tackle the quiz, making it short, engaging, and valuable for both our users and the generator. After studying brand questionnaires used by professional designers, my team and I came up with ten questions that allowed MyTotem’s generator to understand a brand while simultaneously creating unique social media graphics.

Measure, Test, Adjust

Using interactive prototypes and user testing, we were able to completely reform the user journey from awareness to subscribing. We found some clear trends in areas that needed improvement before we could deliver the final prototype.

No Commitment

Before users could take the brand quiz, they were offered a two-week free trial upon inputting their credit card information. By moving the sign-up to follow the quiz and removing the credit card commitment, users were more obligated to sign up since there was “nothing to lose.”

Asking the Right Questions

For a generator to replace designers we would need clients to describe in-depth what they are looking for. We adjusted the quiz questions to make sure the user’s felt like they were giving just enough information to receive unique results tailored to their brand.

Instilling Trust

By breaking down how the process works, adding happy customer reviews and displaying MyTotem’s previous work, we relay to new leads that MyTotem provides a service that can be trusted.

Brand Refresh

MyTotem did not have a brand set in stone. Working with Ashley’s needs of a minimalistic yet engaging website, helped us define the brand’s personality: how it should look, sound, and act. We chose colors that were bold, yet “not in your face”, illustrations that portrayed a friendly demeanor, and set a tone that felt personable.

The Final Prototype

The resulting high-fidelity prototype showcases all the research and refinements based on our ideal user’s feedback while still meeting our client's criteria. Resulting in a delightful, simple, and engaging onboarding experience.

Feel free to try our our final prototype:https://bit.ly/3o77T7g
Video walk through coming soon.

Results &
Next Steps

"I absolutely love it! This whole process has been amazing and I can't believe how much you guys have done in just three-weeks." - Ashley Richardson, CEO & Founder

Ashley was beyond excited when we presented her with the new direction for MyTotem. She is currently working with a developer to bring our design to life. She plans to launch the new iteration in Q4 of 2020.

Reflections

This project challenged my team and me in many ways. Initially, I thought the task to update our client’s onboarding process was going to be a simple change in information architecture. Little did I know, all of the elements and copy needed to change in order to support the ideal experience.
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This project also showed me how important the copy is along with the UI. If my team was not able to write such strong and clarifying copy, the new design of MyTotem would just be a pretty face with no substance.