1. About
During over 2 years, our team developed Vibely, an innovative community platform that later would be acquired by Kajabi becoming the next generation of Kajabi Communities (Communities 2.0).
Until then, Kajabi had a community within their course product (Communities 1.0), but this one had limited functionalities.
2. Problem
Kajabi creators were seeking a more complete community that would allow their members to interact across different courses and products leading to a higher engagement.
The Vibely platform had a mobile and a web app and they needed to be integrated with the Kajabi products not only in functionality but in look and feel.
3. Research
Goals
As part of this integration, we first needed to take into account the needs of our new users. Our research goals were:
Understand if Kajabi customers would use Vibely today to support their community (if not, what else would be table stakes features)
Understand how customers perceive Vibely: understand what they think about the look/feel/interaction of the application. Understand what they think of the features: which are key, which are interesting, which are missing, and which are not necessary.
Understand how they would expect to use a community tool like this alongside Kajabi.
13 customers participated in a 60-minute interview where we observed them explore live Vibely communities as well as a test community created for testing and answered a series of questions.
Executive Summary
Overall, customers expressed a lot of interest in the Vibely Community and many would be interested in trying it for their own business.
The community had a lot of key features customers were looking for: an attractive look and feel, customizable onboarding, and some key native features such as meetups, challenges, live video, and circle chats.
It was missing a few key features to improve engagement such as post & reply, more customization, or a feed page.
Customer report choosing Kajabi because it is an all-in-one solution for their business, and they would expect Kajabi’s community to be fully integrated into the all-in-one system.
4. Execution
In an effort to meet the Kajabi user’s needs, Vibely was submitted to a transformation not only in its entire user interface but in its structure by implementing new core features.
Community Settings
The Community Settings was integrated into the Kajabi admin following the existing hierarchy for the rest of Kajabi product.
New features were added to these Community Settings so creators and administrators would be able to customize things like the navigation menu, the order of their feeds and chats, or their email and notification settings.
Feed
The addition of a feed page became crucial for member engagement and a whole new set of features came along with it. The feed would not only allow users to create posts but it would open de possibility of commenting and replying to them as well as reacting with emojis. Users could give rich formatting to their posts and the creators or administrators of the communities would be able to schedule posts and pin them to the top of the feed.
Pinned Posts
Emoji Reactions
Comments and Replies
Schedule Posts
Rich Formatting
