Product Design
Introduction
In the fast-paced world of SaaS digital marketing platforms, maintaining excellent user experiences is a challenging feat. While good product onboarding is recognised as product design best practice, it’s often either poorly executed or overlooked. Why? The answer often lies in the constraints imposed by agile and lean UX principles that drive continuous updates. These updates can make maintaining or even initiating comprehensive onboarding workflows both complex and costly.
Setting Up for Failure: The Old User Experience
In the past at Vision6, we offered a wide array of features but ran into a critical issue: new users would often spend a lot of effort creating their first email campaigns, only to encounter error messages when they tried to send them. The issue was that their accounts were missing the essential data needed for a successful email send. This turned what should be an exciting first experience into a frustrating one.
Transforming User Exploration into Meaningful Action: The Catalyst of FullStory Insights
Equipped with internal Mixpanel data and FullStory session playbacks, we found out just how extensive this problem was. According to Mixpanel, 51% of new users went straight to our email designer, and another 17% arrived there through a less direct route. Meanwhile, FullStory revealed that upon landing on the dashboard, these users were confused about their next steps. Despite their initial confusion, they were willing to expend significant effort exploring the platform—only to be thwarted by incomplete account setups and subsequent error messages. This resulted in a disappointingly low trial sign-up retention rate of 1.68%.
The critical insights gained from FullStory became the linchpin for FLOW (Front-Loaded Onboarding Workflow). Viewing countless FullStory session playbacks, I was struck by the considerable time and effort users were willing to invest in exploring our platform, despite their initial confusion. It was this revelation—this untapped reservoir of user willingness to engage—that inspired the creation of FLOW. The feature was engineered to harness this initial user enthusiasm, guiding it into a sequence of meaningful actions that set trial users on a path for immediate and sustained success.
Unveiling FLOW: A Front-Loaded Onboarding Workflow
At the core of FLOW lies a four-step onboarding process, activated immediately upon a new user's trial account setup. This journey comprises four minimally designed pages: 'About You', 'Organisation Details', 'Sender Details', and 'Goals'.
About You
At the core of FLOW lies a four-step onboarding process, activated immediately upon a new user's trial account setup. This journey comprises four minimally designed pages: 'About You', 'Organisation Details', 'Sender Details', and 'Goals'.
Organisation Details
On this page, users are prompted to provide key data such as the Organisation Name, Organisation Address, and Organisation Country. This information serves multiple purposes: it enables us to personalize interactions within the platform, facilitates effective communication, and ensures adherence to legal requirements outlined in laws like the Spam Act 2003.
Sender Details
This page collects the user’s sender name, email campaign sender email address, and mobile number in line with anti-spam regulations. These details serve the dual purpose of helping to prevent emails from being filtered as spam while also priming the user’s account for SMS messaging and multi-factor authentication.
Goals
The final step is designed to identify the user’s immediate objectives, whether that’s gaining more subscribers, boosting sales, or simply exploring the service. This single-choice feature allows us to fine-tune the dashboard’s help cards to each user’s specific needs, while also gathering clean, actionable data on their goals. The option to subscribe to our monthly newsletter is strategically presented post-goal selection, just before the onboarding process is completed.
The Labour Illusion and User Satisfaction
Another feature in FLOW is the ‘Building your account’ screen, which appears after users click ‘Launch Vision6’ and before their personalised dashboard is displayed. Designed to leverage the psychological principle known as the Labour Illusion. This brief waiting period subtly conveys to users that dedicated effort is being applied to personalise their experience, thus enhancing their perception of the product’s value.
The Final Element of FLOW: A Customised Dashboard
The crowning feature of FLOW is a customised dashboard, acting as immediate feedback that we’ve tuned into the user’s goals and preferences. Positioned at the top of the dashboard is the help card section. Each card serves two primary functions: it offers a direct link for quick navigation to the associated feature and provides a button to launch a brief video introduction, thereby facilitating feature adoption.
The help card section incorporates a straightforward card management system that allows users to show or hide cards at their discretion. Though the initial selection of cards is determined by user responses during onboarding, additional cards containing further help content can be enabled via the card management interface. This system taps into the user’s innate curiosity and eagerness to explore, assuring them that new insights they may need further down the line are immediately available without leaving the product.
Data-Driven Design: Metrics and Feedback Loop
Incorporated into FLOW is a comprehensive metric-gathering mechanism that leverages Mixpanel to capture essential data points—from conversion rates and help card interactions to the breakdown of user-defined goals and retention rates. This data-centric approach doesn’t just serve as a performance scoreboard; it actively informs ongoing improvements to FLOW, thereby closing the feedback loop and allowing us to identify improvements.
Outstanding Results and Future Prospects
Our current A/B testing results indicate a threefold increase in retention rates among new users who’ve gone through FLOW compared to those who have not. This drastic improvement is not only a testament to the efficacy of a well-designed onboarding process but also a promise of what we aim to achieve: a seamless, intuitive, personalised and supported user experience.
Conclusion
FLOW stands as an example of how user-centric design can significantly impact engagement and satisfaction. From first-hand data collection to the application of behavioural science in design, FLOW transforms the nebulous task of onboarding into a streamlined, meaningful experience. Our A/B testing results, indicating a threefold increase in retention rates among new users, underscore this point.
From wireframes in InVision Freehand to a fully realised feature, this project garnered immediate stakeholder approval. The message is clear: a well-designed onboarding process isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.
By introducing a structured and somewhat rigorous onboarding process, FLOW inadvertently serves as a filter against potential bad actors. The steps involved in setting up an account add a layer of effort that discourages those looking to misuse our system for spamming or other malicious activities. This added layer of complexity is typically no deterrent for genuine users who are interested in leveraging our platform for legitimate business growth.
As we continue to collect and analyse data, I am confident that FLOW will not only improve the customer experience but also significantly contribute to the bottom line of the company, creating a win-win scenario for the business and its customers.