Admin Foundation Series #2 - Overview of the User Experience

Overview

In this article, we'll take a look at the user experience on the PeopleGrove platform. As an administrator, it's important for you to have a foundational understanding of the features and functionality in order to best support your users. So let's dive right in! This article covers the user sign up flow, how to build a profile, how to navigate key features of the platform, how our community facilitates connections, and how users can update their profile and preferences as well as access support.

User Signup Flow

Here's a quick overview of the signup flow. For a more detailed perspective, check out this article.

1. A learner's experience begins with a compelling email invitation to join your institutions's platform.

2. After clicking on the call to action, they're led to a landing page that's branded for your specific community and explains the value of joining.

3. Clicking to join leads to a screen where they can sign up using single sign on (if it's been enabled), LinkedIn, or email. They add their credentials to create an account.

4. Next, they're asked to choose their user type (category). Each user type is presented with different sign up questions and may have a slightly different experience on the platform based on where they are in their career journey.

 5. Then, the learner is asked a few questions about how they like to spend their time and what they're studying.

6. Learners are encouraged to add a profile picture.

7. The last step here is an opportunity for you as an administrator to ask any custom questions that the system doesn't ask by default.

Notice that we've kept the sign up flow intentionally quick and easy, asking only what's essential so that users can quickly activate. Once they're on the platform, we nudge them toward building out a more robust profile, but it's important to make onboarding as quick and easy as possible.

Compass

The Compass feature, located on the lefthand side of the page, is a personalized onboarding checklist for students and alumni. It's designed to give new users direction and next steps as they orient themselves to the PeopleGrove platform and it allows us to deliver a more personalized experience.

First, the new learner is asked what they're here to do on the platform. Once the platform understands their goals, their action items become more specific and relevant to where they are in their career journey. As they continue to cross items off, the platform gets smarter and is able to serve up more relevant content and recommendations on the homepage and across the site.

Key Features

Note: if you don't see one or more of these features on your platform, no need to worry - your site has been tailored to your institution's specific configuration and feature preferences! Don't hesitate to reach out to your customer success manager if you have any questions about what's included in your platform.

Community

The Community is where your users browse and connect with individuals who have similar interests, goals, and backgrounds. They can browse profiles and search and filter based on industry, help topic, degree, and more.

 

Clicking into a person's profile reveals: 

• things that they can help with
• what motivates them
• job functions and industries they have expertise in
• their career journey and how they've gotten to where they are today 

Groups

In addition to being able to connect through the community, users can also connect through the Groups feature. The Groups feature allows you to cultivate interest in specific areas for greater focus, conversation, and connections.

Programs

Our Programs feature allows you to pair mentees with mentors in a more formal, structured capacity.

Events

Our Events feature allows you to share about in-person and virtual events of relevance to your community.

Career Paths

Shifting to the career section of the navigation, learners can explore Career Paths to get a better sense of what suits them best. Here they can learn what to expect from a variety of careers that match their interests and skills.

Jobs

Next, the Jobs feature allows users to browse available jobs and discover the connections they have to those jobs right here within community.

Projects

Using the Projects feature, users can learn by doing gaining real world knowledge through experiential learning projects.

Resources

With Resources, users can choose from available learning pathways to gain skills, as well as browse any helpful resources that have been added by administrators. These can include videos, links to other sites, articles, etcetera.

Under Resources, you have the option to add a business directory.

You're also able to host an alumni directory to feature alumni businesses.

Inbox

The inbox is essential - it's where users go to communicate! That's why we make the inbox easily accessible on the top navigation. Here users can schedule meetings, hold phone or video calls, and share documents and files with anyone they've connected with on the platform.

Profile and Preferences

On the righthand side of the page under their profile image, users can update their profile and adjust their account preferences.

In their profile, they're able to share details such as their location, career story, professional experience, educational background, and any custom fields that your team might have added specifically for your platform.

Under My Preferences, users can adjust their notification preferences for receiving email and text alerts. Here they can determine who can see their profile, adjust their availability, do general account maintenance, and sync their calendar for more seamless scheduling.

Finally, know that your users are well supported whenever questions or issues may arise! By simply hovering over the question mark icon in the bottom right corner, they can access our help area and browse help articles from our knowledge base or submit a help ticket to our responsive team!