OVERVIEW
How I made a multi-sided platform easier to discover
Growth for Impact is a platform connecting the sustainability ecosystem, helping companies hire talent and find consultants, jobseekers discover roles, startups access grants, investors find opportunities, and educators and students connect with learning resources.
Its existing experience, however, made this breadth difficult to discover. I redesigned the homepage and the signup journey from it to clarify the offering, prioritize high-value audiences, and help users find the right service faster.
Team
User Experience Designer (me) Developer · Copywriter · Founder/CEO
Skills
Product Strategy · Information Architecture · Accessibility · JTBD · Onboarding Design
Timeline
4 Weeks
Design contribution
Repositioned Growth for Impact into a multi-sided platform, with priority journeys and a 3-step signup flow, by restructuring discovery
PROBLEM
More users were not the answer
Growth for Impact had a marketplace problem: one side needed the other to create value. Job seekers needed employers, consultants needed clients, educators needed learners, and startups needed funders.
Companies mattered most because they brought both revenue and opportunities. Without enough demand, adding more supply would not help, for example, consultants had little reason to build detailed profiles without real projects waiting for them.
The current homepage had 3 major problems
Narrow positioning
The homepage centered only on companies seeking consultants
Inconsistent entry
Some users only appeared in the navbar but not on the page
Services buried
Some priority services (Startups, Courses, other tools) were buried in the footer
SOLUTIONS
One ecosystem, one entry point, multiple routes
After exploring low-fidelity directions, I narrowed the homepage to three approaches.
DESIGN TRADE-OFFS
Platform breadth
Shows the platform serves multiple needs
Many entry points
Several separate CTAs make it confusing
Weak hierarchy
Several CTAs compete for attention, making it harder to identify a primary action.
DESIGN TRADE-OFFS
Platform breadth
Shows the platform serves multiple needs
Single CTA
Keeps one primary entry point for users
Weak hierarchy
Several explainer cards risk overloading users with unnecessary information.
DESIGN TRADE-OFFS
Platform breadth
Shows the platform serves multiple needs
Single CTA
Keeps one primary entry point for users
Stronger hierarchy
Keeps the hero focused while allowing priority journeys to receive more detail further down the page
Rather than asking users to choose between several competing actions, I kept one primary CTA and moved the actual choice into onboarding.
SOLUTIONS
Connecting both sides
I paired related journeys such as hiring with job seeking, teaching with learning, and funding with investing. This made each relationship easier to understand while showing how one user’s need creates value for another.
Rather than asking users to choose between several competing actions, I kept one primary CTA and moved the actual choice into onboarding.
I grouped complementary users around the same exchange, showing how one side’s need creates value for the other.
SOLUTIONS
Supporting improvements
I also tightened button consistency and accessibility, and added a fallback path for users whose needs did not fit the predefined journeys.
IMPACT
More pathways, a clearer journey
The shipped redesign introduced three key changes to the experience:
Broader discovery
More of the platform’s core journeys became visible within the main experience instead of being buried or disconnected.
One clear entry point
A single goal-based signup flow gave users a consistent way into the platform based on what they wanted to do.
Stronger hierarchy
Higher-priority demand-side journeys received more prominence, while other audiences remained accessible.
The final structure was shaped through founder reviews and development input around business priorities, hierarchy, SEO, and implementation.
Post-launch analytics were not available to me, so acquisition and conversion impact remain unquantified. To evaluate the redesign, I would track audience mix, signup completion, progression to relevant services, and task completion by user type.
REFLECTION
Reflection: “The platform’s complexity is the business’s problem to solve, not the user’s.”
My problem started with a simple question: “How do I explain the whole platform?” The services already existed; I needed to make them clearer.
But showing everything weakened the hierarchy, while hiding too much made the platform feel narrower than it was. That shifted my thinking from explaining the whole business to: “What does this user need to understand right now?”
What I would test next is not whether users have only one need, but whether starting with one primary goal helps them reach value more easily before introducing secondary ones.
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