— PROJECT NAME
Improve onboarding experience
— ROLE
Art Direction
Graphic Design
Branding
— COLLABORATE WITH
Wes Oudshoorn
Nuala Doyle
Luismi Ramírez
Davis Norde
Many companies have their challenges about how to introduce their products and explain how to use them. It's important to give information at the right time to help users install the product and make a purchase.
However, it's not easy to find the right timing because many users don't like getting too much information. We had these concerns for a while and got a chance to collaborate with different teams to solve the problem. To do this, we created a plan within the product team and worked with each team to fix the issues.
1. Know yourself first
There is an old Korean saying “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will win a hundred battles.”
I started sketching out our current flows – to see what our strengths and problems actually are. I’ve gathered all the information about what we’ve been doing for the onboarding process, ranging from human efforts such as demo calls or customer chats to installation flows.
Where the purchase decision takes place
This way I could spot where the purchase decision takes place – when they configure our product and start clicking around our product. That makes us realize that improving the onboarding experience is important.
From there, we’ve decided to focus on two main parts – email flows and installation flows. Actually, those are the things that we’ve been waiting to update for a long time, and we tried to communicate their importance to the team through the small online workshop.
Afterward, I’ve started checking the current flow, and started thinking about how to update them.
2. Competitor analysis and user testing
In order to find the best way to update the current flow, it’s important to check out what our competitors are doing. Thanks to our customer success team, marketing team, and integration team, I could gather all the great information about our competitors. (It would be impossible to do everything alone.)
Nuala and Connor have compiled great information about our competitors, and analyzed the pros and cons of each competitor.
Additionally, the integration team helped with executing the user testing – because all of the users are developers and they have the same background, which will enable smoother and easier communication. It’s been helping me understand which direction we need to go in, simultaneously bringing a lot of inspiration to us.
3. Time to make flows!
Thanks to the help we got with the research part, we were able to save a tremendous amount of time, making it much easier to map out the flow.
We started setting up the new strategies and drawing the new email flows based on them:
1. Reduce the number of emails.
2. Combine the information from different emails into one.
3. Send a recommended setup email as soon as users start sending data to the product, so they get the right information at the right time.
New email flow
During the installation process, user testing showed that users got confused and felt lost when following one combined document. So, instead of merging the installation steps, we decided to break them down into simple, individual steps that users can follow easily.
And I started drawing out each framework’s flow based on our new strategies.
We standardized commonly used screens and singled out only the new types appearing at each step. This way, we aimed at reducing the developers' workload.
4. Finally UI design
Since we all have agreed on the flows, I can finally start working on the UI design. This is not really difficult given that we already have our solid design system.
The email UI design was a bit challenging due to some technical difficulties, so we couldn’t change it dramatically after all.
But there was still some room to show our brand identity, so I added an image on top of it, and tried to make it as simple as possible.
As for installation flow, we focused on making it as simple as possible, and tried not to give too much information on one screen.
But at the same time, our users tend to rather skip the information, so we added a tip or the ‘required’ pattern for them to get a visual hint quickly.
5. Result?
The next step is to check the statistics to verify whether this onboarding process project has been meaningful. We are currently in the development stage.