Streamlined, Conversion-Focused Onboarding for a Personalized Platform

Gardenstead

Streamlined, Conversion-Focused Onboarding for a Personalized Platform

B2C

Onboarding

media

Overview

I played a central role in designing a personalized onboarding experience and content platform to help convert Gardenstead’s 300k+ social media followers into subscribers after identifying key gaps between audience engagement and premium offerings.

Through close cross-functional collaboration, I helped shape an experience grounded in user research, content strategy, and competitive analysis that laid the foundation for long-term growth and monetization.

Key improvements

Curated community content platform
Optimized conversion & subscription funnel
Product growth strategy established‍
Accessible (WCAG 2.2) color usage & screen reader compatibility
Clear, actionable copy

>300k

Active users

engaged daily

Moderated

user interviews conducted

WCAG

2.2

accessible design

The full story

For a deep dive into this project and a closer look at my process, scroll down to continue reading!

Business objective review

Before anything else, I learned about the company, their current user base, and what exactly they wanted to accomplish within the timeline of our project through a series of intake calls with the Gardenstead team, including their head of marketing and CEO.

"Our goal has always been to connect gardeners, foster and share knowledge, and make gardening resources available to everyone."

Gardenstead's vision is to expand its offerings as a company to engage more of their users with the website, and ultimately encourage these users to subscribe to a paid product.

In particular, the CEO made it clear to us that they intend to move in the direction of monetized video content, though they hadn't yet verified if video content was something their users would actually see value from.

Project plan

After gaining a clearer understanding of Gardenstead's goals and mission, not only during this project but down the line as well, we defined the scope of this fast-paced project by establishing a clear timeline of milestones and deliverables to adhere to.

Strategic competitive analysis

The challenge we faced right away was understanding market gaps so that we could identify differentiation opportunities for Gardenstead.

We evaluated 6 existing platforms using Nielsen Norman Group's usability heuristics focused on conversion optimization.

Direct Competitors

The Plant Club: Premium plant care subscriptions
Planta: Freemium plant identification and care app
Gardenista: Content-driven gardening lifestyle platform

Indirect Competitors Analysis

Wondrium: Educational video subscription model
Create Academy: Creative skills learning platform
Skillshare: Community-driven skill development

Key opportunity: no other platform combined social community engagement with personalized premium content curation, which is exactly where Gardenstead could capture market share.

Recruitment survey

The next step was to learn about these users firsthand.

My initial strategy was to leverage Gardenstead's substantial Facebook community to screen and recruit interview participants through a targeted survey.

Although we received a substantial number of responses within just 2 days, over 50% of respondents declined to schedule an interview call at all and many who indicated interest did not reply to our outreach. So... we needed to pivot and get more creative with our recruiting.

I decided to broaden the target criteria and shifted from surveying only Gardenstead users, to surveying active members of online gardening communities more generally.

After sharing the survey to other adjacent Facebook groups, I successfully recruited 7 total interviewees and gained a wealth of quantitative data along the way.

User interviews

I conducted each of these interviews over the course of one week with a diverse pool of participants.

Each of these interviews focused on motivation-driven questions, like:

Why do you join gardening communities?
What drives your content consumption decisions?
When would you decide to pay for content vs seek free alternatives?

After the final interview, my team created an affinity map to assess and group highlights from each conversation to understand and uncover shared sentiments and themes.

Core insights:
‍
1. Users need to see clear, personal value before paying for content;

2. Payment willingness correlates with users' gardening profile;

3. Visually appealing, scannable content motivates users; and

4. Inspiration-seeking drives engagement more than problem-solving.

Personas

To more concretely envision Gardenstead's users, we created 3 primary personas.

Click or tap on the images below to get to know the Gardenstead personas.

Design strategy

Using genuine insights and data to inform our decisions, we defined a solution that would create personalized value for Gardenstead users that they cannot easily find elsewhere.

The two-pronged solution:

1. Drive engagement through an onboarding quiz to demonstrate unique personalization on the platform before introducing premium access.

2. A tiered subscription-based platform that balances inspirational browsing with practical guidance, emphasizing image-rich layouts and sharing features.

Initial sketches

I partnered with my team to design 3 critical screens as a starting point for building this solution: the quiz page, the quiz results page, and the content library page.

Wireframes

After refining the initial sketches, we crafted low-fidelity mockups and established a base style guide to manage our designs and architecture.

Style & component library

While Gardenstead had some existing brand guidelines prior to the start of this project, there was no real source of truth for their product or styles.

My team and I established a new, consolidated style guide and component library to serve as a scalable system for Gardenstead as their brand and business grows.

Key improvements: WCAG 2.2 accessible color usage, organized variable components, enhanced microinteractions and validation patterns

High fidelity prototype

Collaborating closely as the designs progressed, my team and I rapidly designed and prototyped a high fidelity, interactive model of our solution.

Client handoff

My team and I presented our design solution & research insights to Gardenstead stakeholders, walked through the interactive prototype with the client, and explained our rationale for the proposed UX and UI changes we determined would be most beneficial to the company in achieving their business goals. Gardenstead was receptive to our proposals, and enthusiastic about all that we accomplished for them within a relatively short project timeframe.

Next steps

Since this project was completed on a contract basis, my design team for this project handed off the responsibility of developing and actually implementing the designs to the Gardenstead team and their in-house engineers.

Even though this project came to an end, I established strong relationships with both the designers on my direct team and the client team as well. I look forward to this new solution being launched in the coming months and to maintaining partnerships well into the future.

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