Case Study: Marie Forleo
- Long term customer journey and experience design for a big purchase decision
- Curating and presenting a wealth of information in byte-size accessible formats that don't feel like information overload
- Applying educational psychology concepts like "scaffolding" which are important for teaching a framework of how to think about a completely new area of study.
- Designing features to add delight and make the learning experience feel more casual, entertaining, and editorial (vs. academic)
The Challenge: The free editorial experience (MarieTV, weekly blog..) lived and felt separate from the next step:
"I have a decent general grasp on what it would be like for me to start my own business, and I'm ready to put some skin in the game and see how I fare with the learning curve!"
Translating the Overall Journey Map into the Experience Flow - 45 pages of wireframes and flow maps!
We needed to create a seamless bridge between the editorial, which focused on inspiring you to start your own business, to information you would need to choose the appropriate next step for yourself: do i buy a simple starter course and dip a toe in? or do I jump into the $2,000 10-week Marie Forleo B-school.
In order to do that, we would need to create essentially a shop that acted more like the fitting room in your favorite clothing store –– a dedicated place for you to try on options, compare in an easy to digest way, and walk out confident about your decision.
The second bridge we needed to create was between the fitting room experience and the purchase experience.
A challenge was that each of the courses lived inside its own microsite with a sales page custom to each course. Second, each course had a different runtimes - B-school runs during the same time every year, while a copywriting course might run twice a year, while an audiobook might be evergreen available.
To solve this, we needed to build a master shop page with enough soft content (testimonials, visuals, etc..) around each course to make the customer's focus on each product as a lifestyle choice, rather than a content format and timing choice.
Learning without it feeling like learning
Editorial that feels more like reading Better Homes, Food & Wine, or Cosmo over a dry technical manual
The primary pathway of entry was through individual blog articles either through Google search, or the link being shared.
Inside each blog article was our opportunity to create a hook into the MF ecosystem. We solved questions like:
- How to establish credibility, brand awareness, and loyalty? i.e. Do people coming from google know who Marie Forleo is? How can we build an onboarding experience around that?
- Is this a read-only experience? Or will we build interactivity so readers can break off pieces of content they liked from that article to reshare and keep for themselves?
- What's our internal process or map of the next article to read or episode to watch?
MarieTV Library
Designing a hub with enough angles on the content (curated lists, collections, randomizer), that you feel it is robust enough to come back to on your own to dive into entrepreneurial resources catered to your mood in that moment
