Onboarding Redesign

Web Design
Project Overview
The Senior product manager on my team at Mattermost came to me with data and a challenge:

92% of new users stop using Mattermost within the first 24 hours.
What can we do to better serve them?

Spoiler:
A clear step-by-step sign up process that demonstrates value, integrates tools, and provides clear onboarding guidance.

Metrics: 40% increase in installed tools
My Contributions
My Role: Product Designer ; UX Researcher

My time on this project involved leading UX strategy and process in which I used user data and stakeholder goals to create a more user-friendly, exploratory design. I created lower fidelity designs, the user flow and content, tested the current and proposed experience and suggested iterations based off of the results.

Team: 2 Product Designers, 2 Engineers, 1 Product Manager
With the initial data point, I began to explore the problem more. Our telemetry was limited to begin with which affected my data points of current users. Instead, I reached out to users who had dropped off within 24 hours and did not return. What I learned was that we were making our users do the work of discovering the value of Mattermost instead of educating them on how to make the most of the product. We also did not offer enough of a differentiation point from our competitors. It was time to update our onboarding to include best practices.
Mattermost
Senior Product Designer
November 2020 — Current
4 day design sprint
I gathered 3 product managers, 2 designers, and 3 engineers globally to convene on this topic and facilitated a virtual 4-day design sprint workshop to tackle this project quickly and efficiently. The workshop consisted of the following activities:

- Discover existing data and documentation
- Explore Competitive Research
- Generate ideas
- Converge and distill ideas
- Conduct usability tests on our top options
Identify desired tools
Through our user interviews, we identified that integrations were a key factor in setting up workflows for our developer persona. We surfaced our most popular integrations in the onboarding flow to help our developer user set up their workspace faster. Once implemented, we saw 66% of workplaces selecting an integration in the onboarding.
a page asking you what tools to connect
Personalized use
One of the characteristics that arose out of our 4-day design sprint was personalization. With this page, we began setting up the infrastructure that allows the user to personalize their space to their goals and intended uses. The planned iteration of this page includes larger workspace templates for each intended use.
a page asking you how you plan to use mattermost
Guided Channel Creation
Before the user enters their workspace, we wanted to help guide them in their workspace set up. This guided creation is an industry standard in project management and communication tools. The next steps for this page include iterating based off additional learnings and likely iterating to include the addition of other tools to this channel, like boards and calls.
A page helping you create your first channel
I recruited a total of 10 user testing participants, for 2 rounds of testing, who fit the following criteria: Developer, Employed, and unfamiliar with Mattermost. I was responsible for:

1. Recruiting the participants
2. Creating the research plan
3. Creating the testing script
4. Conducting the user testing sessions.
User Testing
Research
Iterating based on user data and feedback
Following our user research sessions, we made iterations to improve the usability of the onboarding checklist. Some of the changes included:

- Prioritizing an overview video to align with user preference
- Adjusting the affordance of the checklist items to improve usability
- Iterate on the affordance to delete the onboarding checklist
Iterations we made to the onboarding checklist based on feedback

Wins and Learnings

The wins in this onboarding project were 40% greater installation of tools and a greater understanding of customers' intended use cases. Though we experienced significant data collection issues that hampered our understanding of users' interaction with the onboarding list, I learned that creation oriented tasks are more rewarding and helpful to users than broad action-oriented tasks.
Check out the Prototype!
View Onboarding Prototype
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