New user onboarding — Emily Mills

New User Onboarding Experience

BACKGROUND

The first-time user experience is critical in facilitating user involvement and understanding within a product. On-boarding can be used to introduce new users and returning users to our product, it's capabilities and new features that help the user accomplish their goal.

STEP 1

Understanding the problem

As the company moves to standardize their individual products under one Experience Management (XM) platform, a consistent first-time user experience is needed. Before this project, each product had its own on-boarding experience that was unique to that product and it's users. A standardized and consistent experience is needed to introduce new users to Qualtrics, allow users to try advanced XM features for a limited time and be scalable to accommodate our spectrum of end users.

Establishing goals

User Goals

As a user, I want to access tools and resources to accomplish my goal faster.

As a user, I want to build a simple survey without spending a lot of time on-boarding.

Company goals

As a company, we want to simplify the product to appeal to a larger demographic.

As a company, we want to seamlessly transition users from the free experience to the paid XM platform.

STEP 2

Defining the key objectives

STEP 3

How do our competitors onboard new users?

I performed a competitive analysis on other survey companies to compare to the current Qualtrics onboarding experience. The competitive analysis included documenting first time user flows, evaluating key features and creating a S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.

Comparing onboarding strategies across different products

Comparing Qualtrics experience to competitors

STEP 4

Putting ideas to paper

I used my team design crits to bounce initial ideas and flows around. I created a weekly cadence where I would review process work and initial wireframes for feedback. Once I had flushed out a few different designs solving for the same user flow, I conducted a workshop where my coworkers voted on the design (or pieces of the flow) they liked best.

STEP 5

Upgrading to the new design system

The design team was defining a new design system library for the company, so all design elements used in the on-boarding designs were consistent with the new design system.

The new Qualtrics onboarding experience

PART 1

Custom Qualtrics brand portal

This project included two design components. The first was a brand portal web page, a custom web page created for brands where their employees can discover Qualtrics, read the value prop and self-enroll for an account under their company’s license. Each brand portal is customized in terms of design and content for the brand.

PART 2

New user onboarding questionnaire

The second deliverable was a short, simple and intuitive onboarding questionnaire that allowed us to customize the users experience once in the product. Based on the competitive analysis research, 3-5 introductory questions to establish user role and goal was all we needed to start directing them towards tools and resources in the product that would help accomplish their goals.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Designing a scalable and consistent on-boarding experience is an ongoing project. This summer I was able to identify opportunities within multiple different product experiences and propose solutions to create a better first time on-boarding experience for our customers.

Check out the full presentation from my internship