DIGITALOCEAN
DigitalOcean’s GenAI Welcome page
An in-app marketing and educational storefront experience
TL;DR
For DO customers without GenAI Platform products yet, the GenAI welcome page serves as a home base to learn about the platform and products, DO’s approach to AI software, and access points to test out various features in a try-before-you-buy type experience.
The Opportunity
DigitalOcean offers two experiences for most of its products - the “empty state” experience for users who don’t yet have products in a given category, and the full product experience, for users who are paying for a specific product or service. The GenAI Platform is no different, except that, as the sole designer, content strategist, visual designer, and UX SME, I took a very different stance to this page than other products, with a more visual “curb appeal” marketing approach than the typical DO empty state page.
The GenAI Platform welcome page had gone through two iterations (private alpha July - October 2024; private beta October 2024 - January 2025). Being in private alpha meant we had minimal user feedback on the page, with it mostly serving as a springboard for other parts of the platform. With the private preview period, we were able to get some user feedback between interviews and usability testing, and some (non-statistically significant) analytics on our tracking platform. But when we released the GenAI Platform for public preview in January 2025, we were finally able to get enough traffic to the page to see navigation and scanning trends for the page content.
We also had an a-ha! moment pretty much on the day we released the GenAI Platform to the public, courtesy of a few “polite” tweets in which we were called out for not having features and functionality that we did indeed have but had chosen not to push heavily because they were for a more advanced audience - not the audience we were (at the time) targeting.
Alas, calls for a product repositioning quickly came and, coupled with the new data we were getting from our analytics platform, it was time for redesign v3 of the welcome page.
My role on the team
I was the sole designer for the welcome page redesign, with support from the design team during crits and feedback from team leadership. I leveraged existing illustrations from our brand design team, and collaborated closely with my engineering partner on animations and other styling nuances. I got content editing support from our marketing content strategist, as well.
The Outcome
Our KPI was successful agent creations completed from the welcome page. Not all agents are created from the welcome page - in fact, a very small margin are - but agents are the primary resource of the GenAI Platform and we’ve prioritized agent creation as our key conversion metric.
Agent creation conversion pre-redesign was roughly 5.88%.
Agent creation conversation post-redesign is averaging 10.9%.
The process
I started with a good old fashioned audit of page views, clicks, heat maps, Fullstory session recordings, and any other data I could get my hands on. What I found was disappointing but not necessarily shocking.
A
B
C
D
E
F
18% of agent creates came from this button, which links to agent templates, a quick and dirty attempt at templatizing common use cases for quickly getting started
50% of page visitors selected this button
1.95% of users selected the Create an agent button
0.93% of users selected the Create an knowledge base button
Which is not unexpected, as it’s not a primary resource, but is sometimes a starting point for more advanced users who already have their data organized
near-zero interaction
1.95% of users selected the Next button, but almost none selected the second carousel button
Non-measurable interaction for everything F and below
It was clear…
None of the content on this page was working 🫠
So, I set about exploring all the ways I could improve the content, address our new target audience (AI-curious, tech-native developers and builders), and still provide access to the key touchpoints of the experience.
Explorations - layout
Alongside members of the design team during crits and one-off jam sessions, we explored various content structures, visual treatments, interaction patterns, and anything else we could think of to deliver a more compelling welcome page experience for first-time visitors.
Explorations - Content
We knew from both the tweets and the previous version’s performance that the content was not working. I spent hours with engineers, product leaders, our private and public beta users, and our marketing team to identify opportunities to revise the content. We landed on a few key changes:
focus on the development experience: using the API, using the endpoints, customizing the experience for non-standard use cases
deprioritize the chatbot and chatbot use cases
highlight features in order of complexity
deprioritize individually listing out features, as this was becoming a scalability nightmare to manage without a CMS
pop some blog posts in there
reduce the total number of CTAs
The final design*
No design is final, but this is what shipped with the redesign. Some key highlights:
total content revamp to focus more on the developer experience and less on the “how it works”
less focus on individual products and features, more on outcomes
more on-brand visuals aligns with the DO brand direction
removed most of the dark theme
clarify the CTAs
Performance to date (late May ‘25)
As mentioned at the top, our KPI for this page is agent creations, which are our target conversion touchpoint. Before the redesign, agent creations on this page were hovering a little below 6% at 5.88% - about average for DO welcome pages.
After the redesign shipped, we saw an increase in conversions on this page up to just below 11% - 10.9% as of this writing. Most agent creations still happen outside this page, either through the API or through the big green [Create] button in the global control panel navigation, but we’re happy to see more users finding success on this page.