👔 Onboarding new users to MYOB

Accounting is not a strong point for many small business owners. They want to get these jobs out of the way so they can get back to their passion of running their business. MYOB helps small businesses across Australia and New Zealand do just this - with products such as MYOB Essentials they can easily manage their invoicing, payroll, tax obligations, and more. However, when they first sign up, business owners are often confused and don't know where to start. The aim of this project was to guide users through the first mile of using Essentials in the free trial period and to give them the confidence they need to ultimately subscribe.

For the first phase of the project, a small team was put together to research this group of users and to create lean experiments, testing hypotheses for improving the subscription rate. The majority of the experiments involved signposts to direct users where they wanted to go more quickly, and providing more information of the benefits of the product directly related to their personal goals. My design work included deep contextual research, running in-person interviews, synthesis of this research, solution ideation, visual and interaction design of these solutions, and building out the experiments in code.

After completing several experiments, there was still no change in the propensity of new users to subscribe, due to the lack of information MYOB knew about them. The only information users had to give when signing up for a trial was their email, phone number, and password, which provided little insight for the team to create a more personalised experience. This personalised experience has been proven to be the best method of onboarding new users to SaaS products. As a result, we added a second step to the signup process, asking users to enter their business name and industry. Different industries have very different needs from a product such as Essentials, so this would bring the most immediate benefit while having the business name meant their stamp was put onto the product.

This information allowed the MYOB Sales team to more effectively interact with new users, being able to speak their language and help them with the issues that were actually affecting their industry. After learning this information, the development team was also able to start working on creating more tailored experiences, such as the one for tradies above. Tradies are most interested in sending professional and accurate invoices, and with this experience, they were directed towards the invoicing feature of the product more quickly.

Many further experiments were planned for the team to undertake, such as live chat, onboarding checklists, more helpful empty states, and set-up wizards. While there was no silver bullet to improving the subscription rate for new triallists, this project made it obvious that onboarding is not just one experience, but many. All of these smaller initiatives need to come together in order to make triallists feel inspired about their product choice and confident that it will deliver them the outcomes for their business to succeed.