Business Toolkit: Guiding Small Business Owners Through Growth
2024-2025
Context
LegalZoom was shifting from a transactional formation service to an ongoing platform that supports SMBs throughout their business lifecycle. Newly formed LLC owners engaged heavily during formation but dropped off sharply afterward, leaving helpful tools, subscriptions, and partner offers undiscovered.
Problem
The dashboard’s existing upsell carousel underperformed with <3% engagement and ~1% conversion. Customers felt overwhelmed post-formation, didn’t trust upsells, and didn’t know which tools they needed, or when.
Process
User Research: I interviewed 10 new SMB owners, mapped their journey, and identified three core business stages (Start, Operate, Grow), each with distinct mindsets, pain points, and readiness levels. A repeated theme: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Synthesis & Strategy: I identified the need for low-risk, low-stakes discovery experience, prioritizing pacing and relevance to rebuild trust. I determined a stage-based framework as the backbone for navigation and personalization.
Prototyping & Testing: I ideated across multiple personalization models and prototyped two concepts. After usability testing, I refined a stage-based toolkit experience personalized by business industry and time in business.
Solution
A personalized "Business Toolkit" organized around the stages of running a business. The new design lowered the stakes of browsing, improved trust, and surfaced relevant tools at the right time. It replaced the static carousel with a dynamic, guidance-driven experience.
Impact
Post-launch monitoring showed that the redesigned experience drove a 75% increase in engagement, increased discovery of offers that had been otherwise suppressed, and overall boost in conversions, with variation across offers. A key partner offer saw 2.2× more applicants and 2.9× higher revenue.
FULL CASE STUDY AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.