GROWTH DESIGN ONBOARDING
GROWTH DESIGN ONBOARDING
Role: Lead Product Designer
Team: Product Design, Product Management, 5 Software Engineers (backend and frontend)
Background: While we had an onboarding flow, our new users would often drop off or didn’t understand why they had to conduct certain tasks.
🧠 Problem identification
Problem
While we had an initial design for onboarding, we found that many users were not completing the flow. We decided to identify what was going on and brainstorm ways that we could complete our onboarding flow successfully.
After collaborative brainstorms, FigJam sessions, internal interviews, and tracking some data in amplitude, we decided that the issue had to do with the overcomplication of tasks and decisions needed to be made during the flow. We classified this issue as Psychological/Cognitive Friction. It’s defined as the mental effort required by the user to complete a task.
Solution
How might we reduce cognitive friction and increase completion and delight during our onboarding flow?
🔎 More Research
After identifying our initial problem and goal, I decided to conduct a bit more problem-solving and research before moving on to sketching and designing. While I had a lot of innovative ideas from the research I had previously conducted with our team, CSMs, and brands, I wanted to get inspiration from other successful onboarding experiences. I conducted some comparative and competitive analyses to validate our team’s ideas. After putting together our brainstorms, customer research, and comparative/competitive analysis our team decided there were four major values for our onboarding we wanted to focus on:
Simplicity
Customer Education
Opportunity Cost
Flexibility
Competitive Analysis Workshop
Stakeholder Design Jam
Flow restructuring
Based on our work with research, design, and our plg developers, we decided restructuring the flow and focusing on three main themes is how we would move forward and reduce overall friction
✍️ Initial designs and explorations
A big part of product led growth on my team was experimentation. We wanted to gather insights from other platforms and test/ iterate rapidly to find the best result. Some of our initial experimentations and designs started out as sketches and are shown below.
🚀 Testing and iteration
While we loved the idea of educating our users, we wanted to show them the immediate result of their popup with a backend tool we created that scrapes the URL to design a personalized popup with their fonts and colors in only one click. With this, the user saw the immediate value with only one click and zero extra thought. We still created a learning opportunity with the walkthrough video as well as the flexibility for them to tweak as they see fit.
🤝 Final Design and Outcome
User-Centric Design
Mobile friendly — Our onboarding experience is mobile friendly as we noticed most traffic came through mobile.
Aha Moments — To reduce psychological friction and decision making we used a backend tool to scrape our brands information to create a customized popup based on their site colors, fonts, and images.
Flexibility — We allow the user to save and come back anytime
Education — We create opportunities to learn about the product and the power our popup and automated experience gives brands.
Outcomes
Results
Every single user that has gone through our new flow has activated their popup, which before was about only half
88% of users complete onboarding
What I Learned
Problems in onboarding can help address problems in other areas of the platform
Design Jammin can help us when we’re stuck 😎