Skillay
Skillay had the content. Users were signing up and going quiet. Moderated research sessions revealed the same pattern every time: nobody knew where to start.
Skillay had the content. Users were signing up and going quiet. Moderated research sessions revealed the same pattern every time: nobody knew where to start.
Left: Usability session — participants consistently paused at the same dashboard moment, unsure where to begin. Right: Redesigned onboarding flow centred on a single goal-setting step before content exposure.
Skillay is a platform that connects learners with skill-building content and career development tools. Sign-up rates were healthy. First-week engagement was not. Users were creating accounts and going quiet — browsing briefly and then not returning. The team had run several rounds of interface changes without finding a solution.
The problem wasn't immediately obvious because the product itself was good. The content was well-structured, the design was clean, and the features made sense individually. Drop-off was happening at the experience level, not the feature level.
We ran 18 moderated usability sessions with a representative sample of users across different experience levels and career stages. The pattern was consistent: users arrived with no clear goal, so everything on the dashboard felt equally relevant and nothing felt urgent. When every feature vies for attention, none wins.
We also identified a secondary issue: the onboarding flow presented so many options in the first session that users would close the platform rather than make a decision they weren't ready for. The goal-setting step — buried mid-onboarding — was where most people stalled.
"Every user wanted to learn something specific. But the dashboard presented everything at once, so nothing felt like theirs."
We redesigned the onboarding flow to orient users around a single learning goal before exposing them to the full content library. The goal-setting step moved to position one — the very first interaction after account creation — and the dashboard was rebuilt to surface content relevant to that goal, rather than showing everything at once.
The visual redesign brought a cleaner hierarchy to the dashboard, using whitespace and progressive disclosure to reduce cognitive load without removing any of the platform's depth. First-week drop-off fell by 40% within six weeks of the redesign going live, and users who completed the new onboarding were measurably more likely to engage with content in their first session.
The redesigned experience: goal-first onboarding, a dashboard that surfaces relevant content rather than everything at once. First-week drop-off reduced by 40%.
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