Swim Kim
Optimizing a Multi-Tiered Conversion Funnel Through Persona-Driven Information Architecture
EDTECH & ECOMMERCE
Swim Kim is a professional service brand and online education platform dedicated to teaching life-saving swimming skills to adults and parents of young children. As the founder, Kim Shults brings decades of experience as an educator, crafting a comprehensive suite of resources to share her expertise. In addition to Swim Kim, Kim also founded Face in Water, a nonprofit organization that travels globally to teach swimming in areas where access is limited or unavailable. Her mission is to make swimming, as a critical survival skill, accessible to everyone.
My Role
Lead Growth Product Designer
Team
Brand Designer
Digital Product Designer
Lead Growth Product Designer (myself)
The Challenge
Segmented Drop-offs: The platform struggled to route three highly distinct, high-intent user cohorts (B2B enterprises, autonomous adult learners, and parents seeking educational frameworks)
High Interaction Cost: Disorganized content taxonomy led to high information overwhelm, severe bounce rates across educational blogs, and a high friction purchase path on product pages.
The Strategic UX Interventions
Funnel Optimization: Audited the end-to-end user journey to map funnel leakages, re-architecting the PDP to lower interaction friction and introduce smart upselling triggers that expanded Average Order Value (AOV).
Persona-Driven Architecture: Restructured the site-wide information architecture to create distinct, intuitive navigation pathways for isolated user personas.
Lifecycle System Integration: Designed a closed-loop engagement ecosystem, orchestrating post-purchase validation and cart-recovery mechanics to continuously recapture dropped leads.
San Diego, CA
2024
Impact and Key Takeaways
+3% YoY Conversion Surge
The System Change: Optimized the content taxonomy and integrated seamless cross-selling logic.
The Design Impact: Lowered interaction friction across educational blogs and product-detail hubs, driving a substantial boost in high-intent engagement and contextual product discovery.
+15% Growth in High-Intent Page Traffic
The System Change: Restructured the site-wide information architecture and discoverability pathways.
The Design Impact: Resolved navigational ambiguity, allowing diverse target personas to easily locate relevant resources, which effectively reduced drop-offs and expanded top-of-funnel reach.
+4% YoY Funnel Velocity
The System Change: Engineered targeted, persona-specific intake flows and clean layout mechanics.
The Design Impact: Segmented lead routing for B2B Consulting, Adult Breakthrough Sessions, and Non-profit sector users, successfully driving down form abandonment and capturing highly accurate business opportunities.
User Research
Based on conversations and feedback from Swim Kim’s customer base and leads
Customers find value in learning life-saving skills but feel apprehensive about a “DIY” approach, leading to potential loss in sales.
Adults looking for breakthrough swimming lessons want to book and engage Kim’s services but want more clarity on what to expect, increasing consumer confidence
SwimKim’s blog posts are a wealth of knowledge but difficult to navigate, resulting in high bounce rates and information overwhelm.
Customers find it helpful that the online course and ebook have supplemental products that aid in learning and teaching. However, users get confused on which ones are appropriate due to the close similarities.
Professionals looking to hire a swim consultant need easier ways to vet candidates’ credentials, suggesting the demand for partnership but pathways are unclear
Competitor Research
SwimKim’s competitors are mainly swim instructors that teach in-person at local swim schools and pools. Kim’s blend of products allow for upsell and increased value-add.
Kim’s target audiences help shape the website in a unique way that showcases the range of her expertise and capabilities, having worked with organizations like the American Red Cross and the US Masters Swimming.
The design of swimkim.com is intentional with the aim to be memorable. The previous brand designer was successful in creating a unique look & feel for SwimKim which has been effective in both the website design and marketing.
User Personas
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User Persona 1
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User Persona 2
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User Persona 3
USER JOURNEY
SITEMAP
WIREFRAMES
Constraints and Lessons Learned
Challenge in Positioning
The Problem: A modest baseline demand existed, but product naming conventions, specifically the term "DIY", triggered unexpected but understandable user anxiety.
The Product Insight: Because water safety carries high inherent risk, users associated self learning with danger from potential user error. This positioning friction highlighted that changing the interface alone cannot fix a misaligned product value proposition. Future iterations require testing softer instructional framing.
Operational Boundaries
The Problem: Qualitative data revealed high adult user intent to book direct, live lessons with the founder. However, the business lacked a physical, operational facility (a pool) to further eliminate critical friction points.
The Product Insight: This highlighted a hard operational constraint. No amount of optimized UX design can solve an off-platform physical supply deficit. Recognizing this boundary allowed us to pivot digital efforts away from a broken booking funnel and double down purely on scalable e-commerce asset monetization.