A Curated Onboarding- Conversational Builds Adoption
March 2024 | PM & UX Designer
Project Summary
The ultimate win for Appointlet is a user booking a meeting. This typically predicts the successful retention of a new account, but we weren’t seeing this metric move much despite a few different iterations of the onboarding flow. So we used a new core feature rollout as an opportunity to create a quick and engaging onboarding experience that hit our activation rate goal.
How to find the tricky onboarding balance
Appointlet had gone to both extremes when it came to onboarding. When I joined the company, there was a fairly long, detailed process before a user even saw the dashboard (example shown below on the left), with a 12% activation rate.
Then we decided to try the complete opposite- land users on the dashboard immediately with guidance via tooltip tours as they explored (bottom right), slightly higher at 13% activation.
Both options had their merits, but we hadn’t really seen a significant difference in our activation rate of a user booking their first meeting.
Validation
We were developing a new feature related to users setting up their account, so I used this as an opportunity to refine the onboarding and move the needle on our metric. With this project, our goal was to increase our activation rate from an average of 13% to 20% within the first 90 days.
There were two types of accounts we wanted to reflect in the onboarding flow:
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Multi-user organizations that needed more complex scheduling workflows
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Single user accounts that had a more straightforward process
We used our established personas to flesh out their needs specifically related to onboarding, focusing on the administrator type of role.
Avery the Admin
As a user, I want to test different scheduling services to decide which one suits my organization's needs
From previous onboarding research, we knew the multi-user accounts had a vetting process to test different schedulers. If they chose Appointlet, they’d add additional users and build out their full scheduling workflow.
So we needed to show the value of our product immediately by reflecting their setup as much as possible. We could do so by understanding the following:
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Type of account: If they were a single account or part of an organization
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Organization Structure: If it was controlled by an admin or individually)
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Meeting Types: Did they meet in person, via web conference, etc.
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Bonus: How they discovered Appointlet
Solution Brainstorming
To kickoff the project, I led a brainstorm with the Appointlet team to map out how the requirements. We built a user flow to breakdown the steps for each type of user (shown below).
This was also one of the first projects where I used an agile product management process with my team, which was really helpful in keeping us on track with our work. We had clear requirements which led to highly productive brainstorming sessions like this one:
Design Refinement
It became clear we needed to focus on conversational design to ensure new users weren’t confused with terminology- concepts like "meeting types," "scheduling pages," etc were hard to describe without the context of the dashboard.
It was surprisingly hard to come up with questions that were friendly and straightforward while attaining the information we needed to effectively setup their account.
Final Design
After three rounds of feedback and coordinating with an illustrator, we landed on the final concept which met our goal of being friendly, straightforward, and added value to the user’s setup process:
Results
We released this new onboarding flow in conjunction with the account setup feature in March of 2024 and within the first 90 days, we increased our activation rate by 6%, a much larger increase from our previous two onboarding iterations.
19%
Users who booked a meeting within the first 90 days
Learnings
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This was a big win from our initial launch. We moved the needle on our activation rate more than the past two iterations, which was really exciting.
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Associating dependencies with different features is always complicated. I try to keep this in mind when working on an MVP that isn’t dependent on other work to validate and refine.
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To quickly build an MVP, we repurposed our old onboarding code that didn’t change the UI, but clearly added value from the content.