Clubly is a student-developed club directory for UC Davis. With over 800+ clubs to keep track of and to be added onto Clubly, I designed an onboarding flow and an admin tool for efficient content & team management.
TIMELINE
December 2024 – January 2025
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
1 Product Designer (me!)
1 TPM/Developer
1 Product Manager
SKILLS
User Research
Usability Testing
Product Strategy
Challenge
Compared to the previous academic year, Clubly lost around 60 clubs.
It also takes about 2 weeks for new clubs to be added or even be updated on the Clubly website—which is far too long. Outdated and missing information only causes mistrust between the end-user and Clubly.
How might we design a tool for club admins to onboard and update their club's information in an efficient manner?
Results
As the sole designer, I designed and shipped:
an onboarding experience to encourage club admins to add their club to Clubly, and
a CMS dashboard where club admins can update their club's information at anytime with ease.
My designs have reduced the time it takes to update and add clubs by 99% (from as long as 2 weeks to 5 minutes)!
INTRO / PROBLEM SCOPE
Compared to last year, Clubly lost ~60 clubs.
What's Clubly, & why does this matter?
Clubly is a student-built UC Davis club directory.
Our end-users want to be able to find the clubs they want to join. If we can't offer that, we lose our users—and business.
How do we even get clubs on Clubly?
Clubly sources its info directly from clubs through an AirTable form that club admins fill out every quarter.
If a club does not fill out the form for a new quarter, they're removed from Clubly.
SO, HOW MIGHT WE…
INTRO / FINAL DESIGNS
Empowering club admins to onboard & manage their clubs faster.
A new onboarding form experience & a CMS for both club & Clubly admins.
Adios, AirTable! Introducing our own form to add clubs
No more transferring data from AirTable—our own onboarding flow allows immediate submission into our own database.
A club verification & management system for internal Clubly admins
As long as they have been invited with admin access, anyone on the Clubly team can instantly approve & publish clubs to the website—we no longer have to pester our engineers to do this.
Empowering club admins to manage their club page anytime
Instead of waiting for that quarterly AirTable form, club admins invite their entire team with editing access & update their club's information any time they want.
CHAPTER 1 / RESEARCH + SYNTHESIS
We lost 60 clubs because of both onboarding + internal issues.
USER RESEARCH
Why are club admins not adding their clubs onto Clubly?
With my product manager, I sent a survey with 10 sets of qualitative responses and conducted 8 user interviews to find the root of the issue.
INSIGHT #1
Club events take up admins' time + attention
Admins are more concerned with planning & marketing club events to boost engagement.
INSIGHT #2
Filling out the form is "tedious"
Admins do not enjoy filling out the same form to update their club’s info every quarter.
INSIGHT #3
Filling out the form is assigned to one admin only
Admins need collaboration & flexibility—getting the club onto Clubly should be a team effort.
SERVICE DESIGN AUDIT
This isn't just a club admin problem—it's an internal Clubly issue too
Even at a global scale, I discovered adding a club to Clubly's internal database takes way longer than it should. It takes our developers as long as 2 weeks to add a club, when really the task should only take about 15 minutes.
USER PERSONAS
Thus, I had to also design with these "super admins" in mind
Now that there were 3 types of users in this situation, I drafted user personas to guide my design solution, and to align + clarify these roles with my team…
Because let's be honest: "Clubly admins" and "club admins" are easy to mix up!
DESIGN APPROACH
These discoveries about pain points + users clarified our problem scope
After we discovered club admin and super admin pain points, I formulated a new "How Might We" statement to guide our solution ideation.
HOW MIGHT WE…
boost adoption + retention for UC Davis clubs?
HOW MIGHT WE…
empower any admin to quickly add + update their club information?
CHAPTER 2 / IDEATION
Our solution was a CMS-like dashboard that is scalable for future features.
PRODUCT ROADMAP
The ability to publish changes whenever allows for event-related features
Remember how UXR findings stated that club admins cared more about hosting and marketing their events? Well, this CMS is not only a quick solution to our current problem, but also the foundation for building features for publishing events on Clubly.
FEATURE + STRUCTURE IDEATION
We narrowed down MVP features for a quicker launch
We wanted to launch our CMS quickly to avoid losing more clubs the following quarters—thus, I conducted an existing admin-powered platform audit to aid feature ideation, then collaborated with my team to prioritize high-feasibility ideas, and lastly aligned the team with a finalized + scalable information architecture and user flow.
COMPETITIVE AUDIT
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
INFO ARCHITECTURE + FLOWS
CHAPTER 3 / EXPLORATIONS
Iterating based on usability testing, technical feedback, + trust.
USABILITY TESTING
I tested with 5 admins + consulted with my TPM
Due to the limited time for this deliverable, I could only afford to test my designs with 3 club admins and 2 super admins, while filling in technical gaps through consulting my TPM.
Ideally, I would test at least 5 users for each role.
ONBOARDING FORM + EDITING CLUB INFO
Improving the translation of user input into code
One instance where I deviated from the original AirTable form was how input fields were designed. With feedback from testing and my TPM, we settled on a more visually obvious and low technical effort solution.
ADMIN DASHBOARD
Designing access points for club admins with 2+ clubs
While designing, I found an edge case that could be solved in different ways according to competitive audit findings. We settled on an access point design that was backed by real data: the majority of admins are not admins for 2+ clubs, so a full exposed menu of clubs was acceptable + the most suitable.
CLUB ONBOARDING FLOW
Another edge case! What if a user tries to impersonate a club admin?
Although extreme, I discovered a fatal flaw in our onboarding flow: there's no way for us to truly verify whether a submitted form response was from an actual club admin.
CLUB AUTHENTICATION
Trust is important—that's why we're adding a level of security
Working closely with my TPM, I proposed a solution where we utilize official UC Davis club records to verify onboarding form responses. This way, we prevent hosting fake clubs on Clubly, and maintain trust with our end-users.
CONCLUSION / IMPACT
Shipped just in time for the new Fall '25 academic quarter.
IMPACT
Adding & verifying a club is now almost instantaneous
My designs were launched in Fall '25, and we've already seen over 10 clubs fill out our onboarding form on their own. We've yet to start our marketing initiative, so we're expecting to see even more growth as this quarter progresses!
10+ new clubs
filled out our onboarding form within the first week
99% reduction
in the time it takes to verify + add a club
USER QUOTE
"The user flow for signing up and approving a club is super quick and easy now."
– Clubly's Fall '25 Technical Product Manager
METRICS
However, it's still too early to measure how successful we are…
There are a couple of metrics that I want to measure and have yet to track. These metrics will help pinpoint potential issues in my current designs, and identify how we can get even more clubs to onboard.
# OF CLUBS ADDED
Are clubs completing onboarding?
TASK COMPLETION RATE FOR ONBOARDING FORM
How long does it take for clubs to onboard?
# OF CLUB ADMIN LOGINS
Are admins using our dashboard?
FREQUENCY OF CLUB PAGE EDITS IN A YEAR
Are admins updating their club's information?
# OF ADMIN INVITES SENT + ACCEPTED
Are there multiple club admins using our dashboard?
AFTERWORD / LEARNINGS
The main takeaway? A product is truly an ecosystem of many users!
INSIGHTS
I learned a lot about product strategy + how it translates into design
Not only did I design for a heavily business-oriented problem scope, but I also learned to work with strategies that factored in the user lifecycle funnel: adoption, engagement, + retention. Here are some lessons I learned:
INSIGHT #1
Beware of edge cases early on
INSIGHT #2
Always consider scalability to guide product + design decisions
INSIGHT #3
An urgent problem requires a fast, affordable solution
MAIN TAKEAWAY
The smallest decision can cause a chain reaction
Prior to this project, I overly focused on the end-user, or the consumer. Now, I've learned to account for the entire ecosystem of users within a product—whether that be club admins or even internal product teams—because whatever happens to an overlooked set of users can ultimately trickle down and affect the end-user.
