User Onboarding
Setting up the user for success from first login
Table of Contents
Project Overview
- Determine the user’s role
- Guide the user through content selection to match her role and work interests (JTBD)
- Based on this input, setup the user to provide the best “first experience” of the application that we can offer
Project Background
The application was originally created as a “Regulatory News Feed”. It was designed to meet the needs of a user whose job it is to monitor changes to regulations and standards. We named this user – the Compliance Monitor. This was our only known persona.
As users began working in the platform, different user roles began to emerge. Each role required a different workflow, different alert types and a different view of the data.
We needed to find a way to identify our users by role, and based on their preferences provide a much more personalized and meaningful experience from first login.
Evolving product - New user roles
My Role
Product Architect
Analyze multiple input streams which were brought to the product team’s attention
- Define the problem space and possible solutions
- Come up with a design solution to address the identified challenge
- Work with the design and product teams to expose and define all the components of the solution
- Work with the tech team to understand the feasibility of the project
- “Product own” the implementation buy defining the epics, users stories and acceptance criteria
- Work closely with the development team to see the implementation of the solution
Research
Business and customer inputs
Our product manager was developing a new business module. The new module was targeting a specific user role. We needed to capture user roles and preferences in order to implement this new module.
Different user request were coming in – to change landing page, email preferences, push notification content. A pattern emerged that suggested that the different preferences mapped different user roles: Compliance Monitor, Compliance Subject Matter Expert, Product Compliance Engineer and Manager.
Feedback from our user success team: New users often felt overwhelmed on first login. It was taking too long for the users to grasp the different elements in the system.
This suggested to me, that perhaps, if the user was more actively involved in setting up preferences from the get-go, the content, navigation and filtering options might make more sense on first encounter.
User feedback: User would like more transparency into the content setup process. They would like to be able to personalize the content in order to make it more relevant to their work.
Users were asking for a more relevant experience:
- That the initial page they see, is relevant to their role
- That their inbox alerts are more relevant to their products and markets
- That the content they see better matches their priorities and responsibilities
Customer Success team was reporting difficulty tracking and handholding new users in the system.
My hypothesis was that this difficulty was due to the following:
- There was a big time lag between user setup and the first login
- On first login, new users were not familiar enough with the application landscape
- There was no easy way to for Customer Success to track and handhold a user entering the application for the first time.
Onboarding – Objectives to actions
Analysis and Data Gathering
By the time this initiative came into being, we had identified (through analysis) different groups of users, each with its own set of preferences. For this initiative our tasks were to:
Research Findings
4 user roles 6 possible wizard steps
Design Phase
Why Wizard pattern?
- Onboarding is a “user setup” task with several steps
- We identified dependencies in the steps. The user choices in each step would drive the content on the next wizard step.
- The Wizard logic will remove the decision making challenge from the user
- The “steps” allow us to introduce the building blocks of the application to the new user
- A wizard design, which consists of select options, will allow us to minimize input errors (i.e. prevent user frustration on first encounter)
Design Objectives
Encourage user to Complete
Lead the user to the "Onboarding finish line". Encourage the user to complete onboarding; make it fun, and celebrate successes.
Introduce the Compliance World
World building - As the user steps through onboarding, introduce her to the building blocks that matter to her.
Simplify the Experience
Prevent discomfort, ambiguity, and input errors. Encourage Exploration over concern for accuracy. There should be no "punitive interaction"
Encourage Exploration
Communicate that the process is "forgiving". Assure the user that the settings are flexible and can easily be changed.
Value From the First Login
On complete, set up the user to get immediate value out of the platform - landing page, email options, content preferences.
Proactive User support
Keep the Customer Success Team pro-actively involved and always a click away from the onboarding user.
Design Challenges
During our interviews with users we found that while users express similar needs, perform similar tasks and expect similar services from the platform, there is currently no naming convention for the roles within the compliance teams.
“How do we present our user with Role selection?”
We learned from our users that in smaller Compliance teams, a user may be performing more than one role: a subject matter expert might need to monitor regulations, a compliance team leader might need to to review requirements etc.
“How do we onboard users that are performing more than one role without exposing them to complexity?”
As we started breaking down the wizard steps, we found that each role might require different steps, while the same step may appear in a different order for different roles.
“How do we manage the different wizard flows?”
Design Approach
During our research, we found that our users were not familiar enough with the “role titles” that we came up with. The users were not clear enough what each “title” covered, or what value the application could offer them.
We decided to take a JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) approach and replace the idea of “title” with a “Job to Service” mapping.
We decided not to burden our new users (not familiar with the platform) with the decision on “which title fits me best”.
Instead we would present them with a list of jobs that can be done in the platform, and ask them to select all that apply.
A smart Wizard will route the user through the “onboarding steps” and determine the optimal “user setup”, based on the user’s selection and an internal ranking of “Jobs”.
About Jobs Theory
Mapping Jobs to Services
A “smarter” wizard
Design Exploration
Wizard Layout
Wizard progress - vertical or horizontal
Interactions & Feedback
User selection - location, animation, persistence
Design "Mood"
Onboarding image style - level of formality
Wizard Navigation
Wizard navigation - top or bottom
Content Layout
Wizard page layout - options for selection display to the right or the left of information section?
Welcome Email
User welcome email - style and level of detail
Implementation
Design Decisions in action
After deciding on the
- direction of the wizard progress bar
- location of the navigation
- visual display for the different select items
- page layout
- style for images and icons
- content of customer and supporting emails
we made our first high-fidelity attempt to express our design decisions in the onboarding UI.
Followups and Next Steps
Followups
Onboarding intends to capture the user role and the user personal preferences. Both seem critical to the adoption by exiting users and the product future vision.
A successful “Onboarding experience”, according to our analysis, would require careful mapping of the customer “product/market” worlds to the C2P world.
For many of our existing customers, this mapping does not exist and if it does, it is not comprehensive (needs to be revisited).
Our decision was, therefore, to enable onboarding on demand for all new customers (to be set up accordingly).
This decision would also allow us to compare adoption KPIs of the user “onboarded”, to those of users who are still being set up by our customer success team.
Next steps
- Provide the user with a way to change the selection made during onboarding, based on her growing experience with the platform (see “User profile design”).
- Provide visual feedback to help the user see the impact of a “change” on the content and the push alerts (i.e. highlight recent changes, show items removed, items added etc).
- Look deeper into “how the different roles collaborate in the platform”.
