Optimizing an Onboarding Journey

Fixing a lose-lose-lose scenario to make sure users stick around.

This is the full case study!

2-min summary here.

Skills demonstrated

User Research
Testing
Affinity Mapping
Journey Mapping
Experience Mapping
Stakeholder Management
Ideation
Brainstorming
Mockup
Prototyping

Platform

Web - Desktop

Main Tools

Figma
Google meet
Google Suite
Zoom

Date Range

May 14 2021
to Jun 4 2021

Intro

The problem: Potential new users were struggling during the onboarding phase.

Onboarding: The action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization or familiarizing a new customer or client with one's products or services.

I joined Masterpiece Studio in early May of 2021 - this company specializes in VR-based 3D creation software. The product occupies a small but extremely promising niche of the creative space. Suffice to say, joining them as their first dedicated UX designer, entirely remotely, was a dream come true.

As is the case with many companies, they had yet to realize the tremendous insights a UX Researcher/Designer could bring to the company. At the time, the software could only be downloaded via the website. The CEO of our company suggested I do something about the onboarding journey, as the customer success rate was not too satisfactory.

Planning

In a typical project, I would have conducted secondary research. In this case, the company's marketing, QA and customer support already kept very good tabs on their potential users. Based on the information I was given, the users we were attracting were:

I organized a quick meeting within the company of (at the time) almost 30 people and asked them to reach out to potential test participants. This company hadn't done any self-moderated external testing before this and setting up that functionality was a whole undertaking in itself. I know this company works fast, and I intended to keep up. As such, I was also formulating a test methodology while we were gathering potential participants.

I start every project by doing a test-run to get a sense of what our persona might be in for, and to design an effective test. I took notes as I went. I saw several potential problems, such as the length of the whole journey, intimidating words, unnecessary account creation etc. I will often use these insights to ask test participants probing questions to see if they think it's an issue.

I had prepared a plan to test the entire onboarding journey, including:

Fun fact - to ensure participants' privacy and anonymity, I had them conduct the test via a virtual computer that I hosted for them. I also gave them dummy emails to use for the signup process so they didn't have to use their own.

Within a few days, we had gathered 6 participants.

Testing & Findings

Having prepared my moderator's script and ensured that a run-through of the journey is possible with the current status of the website, I scheduled and conducted tests with each participant. I made sure to record each test (with ensured anonymity and consent) for potential "wow" moments or quotes, good or bad.

By the end of it, I had 6 documents with detailed information about how each participant fared throughout their onboarding journey. I scoured through these documents to find, and organize, an affinity map of all the trends and patterns.

At this point, it was time to make the actual journey map - a powerful tool to help myself, stakeholders and others within the company to visually see how users feel throughout the journey. The "columns" are in chronological order of the journey, and each row breaks down what the user may be doing, thinking and feeling at each step (based on the tests).

There were various issues throughout the journey, but none as prominent as what I called the "Valley Of Despair" (the prominently red area in the "Feeling" row).

Generally speaking, most of the participants simply wanted to quickly try the software before any transactions took place or information was given. This journey did exactly that, yet somehow made the users feel otherwise. Users were convinced that we were asking for credit card information, or that it must be paid for first, despite none of that being true.

When I was presenting the findings to my company, I called this the "lose-lose-lose" scenario.

Other issues included unideal window placement, loading bar convolution, lack of clarity between our two products etc. Before creating this map, I had brainstormed with a few teammates to ideate on a few potential fixes to each problem presented. I included this as a row at the bottom.

Solutions

As mentioned, most of the issues were not about what we were offering, but lack of clarity. We had a free trial, but we weren't saying it clearly enough. We didn't require credit card information for the trial, but the users had no reason to think otherwise.

Most of these issues could simply be solved with well placed copy. Furthermore, I realized that the installer was not personalized to any user - nor was account creation necessary to download it. Since mandatory account creation before seeing any significant progress was proving to be painful, I opted that we should place a prominent download button at the front of the website.

With the findings from our tests and the map, I was able to annotate every part of the site which was proving to be problematic:

Using this plan, I then created mockups of the various pages which implemented solutions from findings.

These changes were very quickly made by the webdev team.

Some website performance issues were handled by our developers as well.

Conclusions

A mere 20 days after I had joined the company, we had finished fixing the problems we discovered. After designing and presenting solutions to the relevant people on my team, they implemented fixes on the website and installer. We had made the necessary changes to improve the onboarding journey for our users.

Some of these changes were:

We conducted another onboarding journey test a few months later, and the result spoke for themselves:

Overall the users flew through the journey and had no issues with discovering the site, browsing, downloading and running the app.

Lessons Learned