Pilipda "Soda" Samattanawin
Timeline - 5 weeks
Team - This is a solo project
My role - UX Research, UX Design, Information Architecture, Prototyping, Usability testing
At a B2B AI-driven digital marketing startup, I took an initiative to create an onboarding process for new customers. Currently, the sales team performs the demo and without them, visitors are having a hard time understanding the value proposition. When a visitor signs up they're in the dashboard space without any guidance. This causes a high drop-off after the signup process.
How might we improve the onboarding process to decrease the number of drop-offs after signing up by fostering greater customer confidence and product knowledge?
Through secondary research and interview with the sales and support team, I found that:
There are 2 main types of customers that are interested in using our product (Since our product is B2B, it was difficult to get real user input, so I rely on the sales and support team for data)
1. Companies that are willing to spend $1000+/month for their ads, have used marketing agencies in the past but did not get amazing results, and have no control over their ad account.
2. Solopreneurs or Small business owners that are new to marketing, not heavily invested, and just wanted to try it out.
We are prioritizing persona #2 while designing the onboarding process because persona #1 is handled directly by the sales team using a demo.
I also see a pattern in the onboarding experience for successful products and I want to focus on:
Goals and expectations for signing up - getting users to their aha moment the fastest
Flexibility - be able to skip at any step of the process
This step helped me understand how companies strongly approached helping their users.
Before starting to identify the problem, I built the current user journey map after the interview with the customer support team. After which I see a clear problem that I can define.
I, then, had an interview and shadowed digital marketing experts so that I know the process of creating successful campaigns.
Using that I was able to form How Might We problem statement for the onboarding experience.
I started brainstorming concepts, keeping in mind the different goals that visitors had signed up. Eventhough we only target small and medium business owners, the behavior and their goal for signing up can vary, some may want to bring their brand awareness, some only focus on conversion. Due to this reason, I decided to allow users to personalize their onboarding experience, resulting in unique guidelines depending on their answers.
The 3 questions will cover:
1. Users’ business industry -
We chose 7 main industries that are interested in our product.
2. Users’ business platform -
Being online or brick & mortar store, using this we will be able to know their target location and strengthen their personalized experience.
3. Users’ marketing goal -
The most important question that would guide the type of campaigns the user should start creating. (Here, we started out with 3 main goals - generate leads, sell products or services, and build brand awareness)
These questions will personalize the onboarding experience for the user. As a plus, our team will understand our users in-depth.
By letting people “customize” their experience, you allow them to invest energy in your product for future rewards.
From Nir Eyal, User investment: make your users do the work (2019)
2021