Understanding the Context and Challenges
At Sagetap, sage profiles serve as the essential interface where vendors and buyers connect, providing comprehensive details including vendor capabilities, purchase activity, payment plans, and increasingly, AI-driven insights. Despite their central role, these profiles faced two significant challenges limiting their effectiveness:
- On the Sagetap platform, Sage data related to initiatives which are user-created and reflected on profiles was often incomplete or inconsistent, reducing the accuracy and value of AI-generated feedback designed to help vendors optimize their offerings.
- Profile pages across both the Sagetap and vendor-facing systems were cluttered and poorly structured, making it difficult for users to quickly scan and interpret valuable AI insights alongside legacy information such as payment plans and purchase history.
Addressing these intertwined challenges demanded a dual approach: improving data quality by driving initiative completeness, and reimagining profile information architecture to enable clearer display and easier navigation of rich, multi-dimensional content.
Project 1: Completion Checklist (Sagetap Platform) — Encouraging Data Completeness
Discovery
Rather than focusing solely on profile completion, this project centered on increasing initiative completeness—the thoroughness with which sages completed critical initiatives they themselves created. Since these initiatives feed directly into the vendor profiles and AI-powered insights, improving completion rates was vital to generating meaningful, actionable data.
Objectives
- Drive initiative completion through a clear, user-friendly checklist integrated in the Sagetap platform
- Provide vendors with progress tracking and contextual guidance to understand the impact of completion
- Enhance data quality feeding AI insights and operational workflows
Design and IdeationOutlined the end-to-end user journey for initiative completion, identifying pain points and informational gaps. Designed modular checklist components integrated into the sage dashboard that display initiative progress, missing critical steps, and motivational triggers. Messaging focused on illustrating the benefits of fully completed initiatives to inspire action.
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Design Concepts Explored
During the initial phase, I explored multiple design concepts to drive initiative completeness effectively while ensuring clarity and motivation for users. The concepts ranged from linear step-by-step checklists guiding sages through sequential tasks, to progress bars with milestone indicators visualizing major phases of each initiative. I also experimented with task card groupings based on priority, contextual inline prompts embedded within workflows to provide real-time nudges, and comprehensive dashboard summaries that gave sages an overview of all ongoing initiatives with drill-down capabilities for details. These variations were designed to find the best balance between simplicity, visibility, and user empowerment, especially accommodating vendors with multiple active initiatives.
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Sage platform: User journey mapping to understand the touchpoints
Defining the New Directions
Outlined the end-to-end user journey for initiative completion, identifying pain points and informational gaps. Designed modular checklist components integrated into the vendor dashboard that display initiative progress, missing critical steps, and motivational triggers. Messaging focused on illustrating the benefits of fully completed initiatives to inspire action.
Finalizing Design & Implementation
Collaborated with engineering to build reusable checklist components featuring progress bars, notifications, and contextual help. Included gradual rollout with analytics to monitor engagement and completion trends.
- Collaborated with engineering to create reusable checklist components.
- Worked with product and content team to refine copywriting and explanatory tooltips.
- Gradually rolled out the feature to vendor users, capturing engagement metrics and direct feedback.
- Iterative improvements made based on analytics and usability testing, ensuring clarity and ease of use even for vendors managing multiple complex initiatives.
Intitiative completion checklist with a target completion reminder
The final design, informed by early explorations of linear checklists, progress bars, and dashboard summaries, centers on a focused side-panel checklist with actionable steps, real-time progress, and contextual guidance directly alongside each initiative. This direction provides immediate clarity and motivation for vendors while seamlessly integrating with the workflow, leading to higher initiative completion rates, improved data quality, and a more intuitive experience for users managing complex evaluation processes.
A workflow of the Initiative completion.
The final design successfully balances clarity, motivation, and scalability, setting the stage for impactful implementation and measurable improvements.
Key Learnings
- Explicit, actionable guidance drove higher completion rates compared to passive reminders.
- Centralized checklist visibility was more effective than contextual prompts dispersed within workflows.
- Modularity allowed the feature to scale with evolving initiative complexity and user behaviors.
- User education via tooltips and context-sensitive messaging reduced confusion and friction.
- Continuous iteration grounded in user feedback was key to adoption.
Results
- Initiative completion rates increased by over 25% in the first quarter after launch.
- Vendors reported feeling more empowered to manage their initiatives and understand the pathway to completion.
- Platform data quality improvements led to more relevant, actionable AI insights surfaced within vendor profiles.
- The checklist system’s modular nature enabled future adaptability for broader platform applications.
The checklist transformed initiative completion at Sagetap by making progress clear and actionable, resulting in higher data quality and stronger user engagement.
