Kajabi Community
Team
Product Manager
Front-end Developers x 2
Back-end Engineers x 3
Role
Staff Product Designer
Duration
Jul 2022 — Aug 2022
I designed the MVP of Community back in February of 2018 which was received with a ton of excitement from customers, due to a growing desire to migrate away from Facebook Groups and own the audience they cultivated. Unfortunately, competing priorities and direction from product leadership forced the MVP to go untouched for years.
Personally, it felt like we were failing the customers we served, especially as we headed into the pandemic. Customers were begging for updates to the MVP and an increasing number of customers were switching back to previous tools. My team and I were finally given the green light to focus on it again in 2022, and were tasked with relaunching the feature as a competitive solution for building an online community.
A lot of customers found success in offering both a course and a community for their members. However, these products were not integrated with each other and felt like two siloed experiences. Customers wanted to offer a more seamless flow for their members across their ecosystem of products on Kajabi.
The community MVP was missing a lot of features that were common in popular tools our customers had switched to and now relied on to drive engagement. This includes things like scheduling posts, polls, GIFs, uploading video files, and direct messaging and live video.
Lastly, because of the way Products worked on Kajabi, there was no way to share specific content with certain Community members. Customers had to create entirely separate Communities for specific cohorts, segments, or tiered membership levels. This meant managing multiple Communities, that were totally siloed from each other, but often consisted of overlapping members.
The main business objective was to increase adoption and engagement. I referenced this in the Kajabi Products case study but we had collected data that showed Kajabi customers who created both a Course and Community retained at a higher rate and earned more in 90 days than those with just a single Course. With this data, leadership wanted to test new product types as well as improve existing products, specifically Community.
My main focus for this project was to find ways we could increase Community engagement, integration, and flexibility. I felt this framing of the problem helped me focus on the major pain points I needed to design for.
To guide this work I set a few goals:
Design Goal #1
Focus on the core product that customers are unhappy with today.
We all wanted Community to be competitive with platforms our customers were adopting like Circle and Mighty Networks. But we also need to deliver an update quickly, so we had to be strategic about our scope, as well as the delivery phases that would come after the first release.
Design Goal #2
Weave Community into the foundation of Kajabi products.
I needed to find ways I could introduce more connective tissue between products and make them more integrated with each other.
Design Goal #3
The new community product must be a viable solution for customers with communities of all sizes.
Both customers early in their journey as well as those later in their lifecycle find a ton of value in building out a community. So the new design had to be able to support businesses and audiences of all sizes.
I worked with my cross-functional team to determine a few metrics we’d use to measure the success of our efforts.
Expand adoption from 15% of customers to approximately 30%
Boost engagement by active members in the first 28 days
Increase CSAT/NPS
Since it had been a while without updates, we really wanted to give our MVP a meaningful makeover and share our roadmap with our users. We needed to show them that we were committed to making Community better.
Now, because we were a bit strapped for time and resources, we had to take things step by step. We split our efforts between the basics and more advanced features like real-time messaging and live video.
On the mobile front, we had some run-ins with Apple. I had previously designed the Kajabi mobile app a few years prior, but Apple's new rules made us strip away all the interactive features. The app became read-only, which was a bummer. But we kept the faith and focused on making it shine on mobile web, with fingers crossed for future improvements with the mobile team.
After conducting a series of research interviews and running surveys I felt I had a clear enough understanding of how our users needs had evolved since the first version of Community was released. The people I spoke to shared how their Community had strengthened the relationship between them and their members, facilitated stronger connections with the material in a course or coaching program, and promoted long-term loyalty.
I prototyped a new design that focused on 3 key things:
1
Allow Community owners to create a more integrated experience across their other products like Courses and Coaching programs.
2
Finally deliver the table-stakes features required for driving engagement and fostering connections between members.
3
Rethink the way people people purchase and access Communities so owners can get the flexibility they want without complicating the management process.
To create more connective tissue across the Community experience I focused on improving the way members navigate between products. Currently customers had to configure separate navigation bars for their website theme and each individual product experience.
Because all of your products are accessed through your Kajabi website, I wanted to turn the navigation bar for the website theme into a global theme component that is applied across their member experience. This would let customers edit their navigation all in one place, and guide customers towards creating an integrated experience from the beginning.
I also wanted to give customers the option to replace the comment section in a Course lesson with a call-to-action that links to a specific Group or Channel within their Community. This felt like a reasonable first stab at unifying conversation between Courses and Community before we explored more complex solutions.
The MVP left a lot of room for improvement and there were a few table-stakes features we just had to deliver. This included things like:
The ability to search for specific content and members within a community.
Allowing admins and moderators to schedule posts in advance.
Granular control for notifications as well as creating a centralized hub for managing notifications.
The ability to create new types of content like polls, GIFs, and file uploads.
A member directory and member profiles to pave the way for direct messaging and other social features we were considering.
Additional features like live video and direct messaging would come in future releases.
Community owners could now control how they monetized and granted access to content on a more granular level. To do this you would start by creating a Group and choose if and how you’d like to monetize it. Then you add channels to the Group to orient discussion however you’d like.
I ran a moderated usability study with 7 Kajabi customers who had communities of various sizes. These participants had tried the MVP, but most of them adopted other tools in its place.
From the usability tests I learned that:
1
All users were able to successfully create a community, group, channel, and post.
2
Users felt the new design was a drastic improvement from the current version and showed a lot of promise.
3
Most users shared they rarely offer a Community as a standalone product and liked the approach of directing discussion about the course content to a specific place in their community.
My team and I presented our plan but leadership chose to explore acquiring a community-focused start-up instead of building and maintaining the feature with the existing team. They hoped to find an acquisition that could give us the features we were looking for out-of-the-box and possibly expand our customer base.
The decision made sense to me, but because of the conviction my team and I felt towards this problem for so long, it was really hard to hear at first. Kajabi had no prior experience acquiring companies and the time it would take to find the right company and integrate their existing tech into our product was unknown.
I just didn’t feel confident we could manage an acquisition successfully and was concerned about our first one being such a critical feature. Despite pushing back, leadership felt this was the right call to make, so I respected their decision and my team and I moved on to other projects while they sought out potential acquisitions.
Several months later Kajabi acquired the community start-up Vibely. Although it wasn’t the solution I had designed, it achieved the goals of the business and our customers. I helped support the integration of Vibely into Kajabi and was happy to see our customers finally have a better solution for building an online Community.
© Sam Croswell 2024