Creating a User Onboarding Experience to reduce churn

Introduction

2Jours is a software company focused on making cost estimating software for the construction industry. As part of my graduation internship, I was tasked to solve a prospect retention issue. *Some intermediate products (such as a persona) and specifics have not been included, because they might give too much insight into the company.

Project duration	Type	Role	Deliverables
15.4.2021 – 5.11.2021	Graduation internship	UX Designer	High fidelity XD prototype
Twenty weeks			Final presentation

The challenge

At the start of the project, the problem wasn’t clearly defined. In order to do this I had several interviews with people from different departments within the company. This resulted in defining the following challenge: How might we use the first interaction with our cost estimating software to make sure as many prospects (who have a background in cost estimating) as possible purchase the software?

The process

In this project I’ve used a combination of Double Diamond and Design Thinking (see image above) as a framework to come up with a solution to the challenge. These frameworks put an emphasis on the user and their needs, which was important to solve the challenge. I applied this in combination with different design methods (such as usability testing, sketching, prototyping, and user interviews) and a flexible sprints system with goals and variable lengths. This allowed flexibility and adjusting on the fly (after each sprint) to help deal with issues that I would come across during the project.

Research and insights

To start off the discovery phase, I analyzed the current situation with regards to the first interaction with 2Jours and their cost-estimating software. This involved doing interviews with employees of the company that are responsible for the user onboarding process and going through and analyzing this process myself. This resulted in me discovering that there was minimal onboarding done when a prospect first starts the software even though it is relatively complex and unique. This helped me decide to go for designing a user onboarding experience.

In this phase I also interviewed several (potential) customers of 2Jours in order to get insights about them and their needs with regards to this challenge. These interviews in combination with other research resulted in several important insights that were fundamental for creating proper solutions. Some of the most important ones were:

The largest group of users is solopreneurs in the construction industry.
They’re mostly interested in a particular module of the software.
The user should not have to complete any complex actions during the onboarding process, because they generally don’t have a lot of experience with computers.
The solution needs to contain a personalized aspect.

The insights in combination with best-practices (such as designing for specific audiences and having progress indicators) and an analysis of the competition resulted in the choice for an interactive onboarding experience.

Designing a solution

In order to get to a working solution I’ve used ideation techniques (brainstorming and sketching) to generate different concepts. These concepts were then presented to stakeholders in order to discuss them and to select the best ones. Three concepts were chosen and they were turned into quick mid-fidelity prototypes using Adobe XD. These three concept prototypes were also discussed and tested internally, and based on the feedback I picked one final concept to develop further: A personalized hands-on tutorial that takes new users through the most important functionality of the software, showing the advantages it offers.

testing the design

I’ve tested and iterated on the prototype of the chosen concept. At first two tests were done internally to help discover usability problems, copy problems, and missing features. Examples of these are:

It wasn’t always clear what was expected of the user,
the text was too long and some points were overly repeated,
and adding compliments after each completed chapter of the tutorial.

After applying these changes I tested the onboarding experience with users, some already familiar with the software and some less so. The tests were arranged by me and done remotely using TeamViewer. I’ve also made recordings (with consent) of each test. The results of the test were generally positive, even though there were still some things that could be improved on. Examples of things that could be better are:

There were some points in the experience where it wasn’t clear enough what a user had to do to continue,
and the solution was possibly not accessible enough and already went too in-depth.

Overall the solution did provide a complete overview of the most important features and what their advantages are and would help prospects in the decision making process.

What I've learned: test more and earlier, and vary and iterate more

To end off I’ve summed up a few things I’ve learned through the project:

The importance of testing with real users and convincing the client of this. I’ve done several rounds of testing, but this was mostly with people that work for the company. When I did eventually test with users, several issues were discovered that I didn’t have time for to fix. In further projects I’d like to test more often and in earlier stages by convincing the client of the importance of testing early.
Making more variations and iterations of possible solutions within the concept. As a point of feedback on the project it was mentioned that I could have created more variations of implementations that fit within the chosen concept. The reason I didn’t do this is that the client wanted a high-fidelity prototype before testing with users and I unfortunately didn’t manage to convince the client of allowing me to test lower fidelity prototypes with users. This made me settle on an implementation too quickly before exploring more.