Driving Member Activity Through a Checklist

Discovery​

Problem Statement

New members struggled to engage after joining a network, and Hosts lacked an efficient tool to guide onboarding. This resulted in low retention and disconnection. The goal was to create a customizable onboarding checklist that helped new members integrate and encourages early engagement.

User Research

As part of the research phase, I focused on identifying pain points in the onboarding experience for new members. To better understand this, I reviewed a wide range of existing Mighty Networks to understand how Hosts currently approached onboarding. A few examples include:

• Long-form onboarding videos that walked members through different areas of the network, such as courses, groups and communities.
• Introductory articles featuring a brief welcome message and a list of suggested people to connect with, such as Hosts, moderators and active members.
• Pinned posts or bulleted lists where Hosts listed important actions like setting up a profile, joining a course or posting an introduction.
• Live welcome events where new members were encouraged to complete a few activities such as attending a live session or posting in an intro thread during their first week.

Dogfooding

As a company, we practiced dogfooding and had our own community called Mighty Community. It was an invaluable source of feedback and insight for developing new features. We shared a number of polls and open questions to understand what Hosts would like to include in a Welcome Checklist. A few examples:

Competitive Benchmarking

During the discovery phase for the Welcome Checklist, I also analyzed onboarding experiences from tools like Evernote, Asana and Airtable, as well as other UI patterns across the web. This helped identify common practices and opportunities to make our experience feel familiar yet optimized for community onboarding.

Kickoff Meetings

As a squad, we held multiple kickoff meetings early in the project to ensure alignment across design, product and engineering. These sessions were crucial for surfacing edge cases, clarifying technical limitations and defining success metrics for the MVP. I facilitated design discussions around member behaviors, checklist flexibility and Host needs to make sure we had a shared understanding before moving into design.

A few key topics we covered included:

• What happens if a member completes all checklist items then the Host adds more items?
• How would the checklist behave for existing members vs. new members?
• Should we limit the number of checklist items?
• Identify success metrics and how we’d measure checklist effectiveness.
• Timeline for MVP delivery and phased rollout of future checklist features.

Design

The design phase is divided into three sections, covering the evolution of the checklist design itself as well as the management experience for Hosts.

• Section 1: Early explorations using existing components
• Section 2: New design direction with custom components

Section 1: Early explorations using existing components

Mighty Networks had an existing checklist feature for when Hosts created a network. As a first exploration, I mocked up what a member checklist would look like by utilizing these existing components. I updated the copy, reorganized the layout and designed an early version of the Welcome Checklist using these pieces.

I reviewed the initial mock with the design team, stakeholders and engineering. I took some notes based on feedback, which are outlined below.

🛠️ Challenges with This Approach

• Limited Modularity: Members had to return to a flyout to complete checklist items, instead of interacting with a global component that could follow them across the product.
• No Support for Rich Media: The existing components didn’t allow for image or video thumbnails—one of the top requests from Hosts to make checklist items more engaging.
• Overly Structured Layout: The rigid, lengthy format made the checklist feel overwhelming. We wanted it to feel approachable and completable, not endless.

Ultimately, I did not to proceed with this direction due to the challenges outlined above. That being said, it was an excellent exercise in clarifying which features were essential, how the checklist should behave and what considerations were needed for creating custom components.

Section 2: New design direction with custom components

Based on feedback from the first iteration, I redesigned the checklist from the ground up using custom components. The new version featured a more compact layout and modular design, allowing members to check off items while exploring the network. The first iteration is shown below:

Feedback on the New Design

I held multiple feedback sessions with the design team to figure out what was working as well as areas to improve for the new design.

✅ What’s Working

• Improved modularity: The checklist could now travel with members and sit above other content, allowing them to explore while keeping the list visible.
• Visual progress: Members could see a progress bar and percentage complete, creating a clear sense of momentum.

🔍 Opportunities to Improve

• Rich media support: The checklist still didn’t support visual assets. Since many Hosts used images or videos in their intro content, I still needed to explore ways to incorporate media.
• Collapsibility: Some members might complete a few items and want to return later. Making the list collapsible could reduce visual noise on the platform.
• Interactivity: The checkbox needed more visual contrast once an item was marked complete. We also discussed animating the progress bar for a more interactive feel.

Final Designs

Based on input from the first iteration, I introduced several improvements that made the checklist feel more  intuitive and aligned with community branding.

This included adding support for community-specific colors and visual assets, making the checklist collapsible for a less intrusive experience and designing an expanded view that leveraged our existing card component for consistency and clarity. These updates helped balance flexibility for Hosts with a welcoming, guided experience for new members.