Personalized User Onboarding Design
UX Strategy
Customer Segmentation
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Company
iMusician, Berlin | 2022
My Role
I've set up the onboarding task force, including a UI Designer, the Head of Product, the Head of Content Marketing, and a Marketing Manager. For the first phase of the project, which began with defining the project's goals with the team, I organized and led all workshops and stakeholder meetings, defined the project's scope, created solutions based on the outputs of these sessions, and delivered a proposed workflow and measurement plan. In the second phase, I further detailed the proposed solutions, created UI designs, and developed a phased implementation plan.
Project
User onboarding is the online equivalent of white-glove service, of holding your customer’s hand as you guide them from feature to feature, flow to flow, listening to their intentions, and ensuring they find the right parts of your product to get started from. Onboarding is the phase a customer goes through between making the decision they want to use a product and being a fully satisfied customer extracting lots of value from the product.
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As iMusician Onboarding Taskforce, our goal was to design a cohesive, holistic and coordinated onboarding across all channels and teams.
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What Is User Onboarding?
User onboarding is the process of guiding new users to find value with our software product. The user onboarding experience starts the moment someone signs up for our product. A good user onboarding experience doesn’t just teach new users how to use software—it teaches them how to use it successfully to meet their goals.
Great user onboarding should shorten our new users’ time to value, guide them to their aha moment, get them to activate faster, boost retention, minimize early churn, and reduce support tickets.
By the end of a user onboarding experience, users should:
Have an understanding of our product’s value - ideally gained through first-hand experience or use.
Be equipped with the information needed to use our core product successfully on their own - or know where to find this information quickly and easily.
Why User Onboarding Is Important?
Product Success Metrics
5 metrics that contribute to an Out of all of the Pirate Metrics, activation is the most important, as just a 25% increase can yield a 34% lift on MRR after just 12 months. Success. User onboarding is the number one thing we can do to improve activation. It’s not just a ‘nice to have’ inside our product—it has a tangible, measurable business impact on our company.​
ACQUISITION
The user finds us
ACTIVATION
The user interacts with us
RETENTION
The user likes us
REVENUE
The user pays us
REFFERAL
The user recommends us
Better onboarding results in higher activation rates, which translates to more product adoption, improved retention, and increased advocacy from our loyal customers—all of which compound over time for exponential growth.
A 15% improvement in user retention in the first week can compound into nearly twice the number of retained users after 10 weeks.
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The Business Impact Of User Onboarding
Good onboarding improves retention by 2.6x* which leads to:
More purchases |
Greater value per purchase
Higher value per customer |
More referrals
Decreased costs |
Support, acquisition
Project Planning
Research
Proposed Solution
Proposed Solution
Ø1
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Research
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Competitor Analysis
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Defining Goals
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Workshops for concept creation
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Reconsider the current approach
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Creating concepts by combining research results and user goals
Ø3
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Creating an onboarding flow and screens by combining best practices, psychological effects, project goals & user goals
Ø2
Ø1
Research & Defining Goals
Project Goals
Primary Goal | Success Metric
Increase the number of signups converting into paying customers.
Secondary Goals
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Increase the revenue through converting these customers at a similar first invoice value
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Reduce costs through a reduction in support tickets created
Additional Benefits | Understanding Our Customers
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Additional data points will be added, allowing for greater segmentation in the future and improved product offering leading to increased customer satisfaction
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Additional information will be captured allowing for more targeted marketing approaches in the future
Primary & Secondary Goals
Creating a seamless onboarding experience equips new customers for success, and motivates
them to use the app, and at the same time educate them on the value of our product.
Anticipate customers’ mindset
Decrease in conversion time
Present full offering + value
Increase in Avg. Order Value and CLV
Show the benefits of iMusician
Increase in customers who convert
Provide the right content at the right time
Decrease in support tickets & fulfillment costs
Mitigate customer errors
Decrease in QA tickets and fulfillment costs
Understanding Our Customers
COLLECTING ACCURATE USER BEHAVIOUR DATA
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Only 5% of users who click on the “Start A Release” button on the onboarding modal complete a release within a day.
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We had no information on what the 95% of users wanted to do, but this was the only available option.
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If we want to become data-informed, we need to know why the user joined us and what their goal is.
Improve Offering & Increase Customer Satisfaction
Gathering data from new customers not only helps us personalize the onboarding journey, it also helps us better
understand our customers so we can shape our product and marketing to their goals and needs.
Deeper customer understanding |
Who they are and why they are here
Increased customer satisfaction |
A feeling that “I can do this”
Decreased acquisition costs |
Understand segment needs
Ø2
Conceptualization
The first thing we did during the conceptualization phase, we went through each persona in detail and adjust them to reflect our customer segments properly. This was crucial to conduct a workshop to create empathy maps which help to point out the context, motivation, pain points & overall goals of each persona.
USER GOALS, MOTIVATIONS & PAIN - POINTS
Personas
Persona Ø1 | Peter Pro
Peter Pro
EXPERIENCED PROFESSIONAL
MUSICIAN
Persona Ø2 | Samantha Starter
Samantha Starter
ASPIRING PROFESSIONAL
MUSICIAN
Persona Ø3 | Leon Labelboss
Leon Labelboss
EXPERIENCED LABEL HEAD
Empathy Maps
To have a better understanding of how our product fits into our user’s life, we discussed their motivation & goals, pointing out why are they signing up for our product, by creating Empathy Maps. Empathy maps helped us to point out the motivation, pain points & overall goals of each persona.
Persona Ø1 | Peter Pro
Persona Ø2 | Samantha Starter
Persona Ø3 | Leon Labelboss
Empathy Map Outputs
OVERALL USER GOALS
Ø1
Release my music quickly and easily
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Get relevant guidance when I need it, where I need it
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Without having to wait for an email to arrive or for an answer to my question via email
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Know where to go when I have more questions / need resources
Ø2
Understand quickly that iMD is right for me
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If this is my first time, I get the feeling that ‘I can do this’
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If I’m experienced, get me quickly to where I need to be
Ø3
I am delightfully surprised later on in my journey when I get information that directly anticipates/meets my needs
How Can We Meet The User Goals?
An onboarding experience based on personas
Users that have not been released before require a little bit more hand-holding via a comprehensive explanation
of the product, music business terms, and their first release.
Users who have previously released should be able to jump in, find the tools they need, see if it has the services
they require and take action.
Resources should be quick and easy to fin
Having resources within the app keeps users in the flow, heading toward their goals, instead of leaving them searching for answers — or worse, getting frustrated and going to a competitor. This also helps reduce support tickets.
Hook customers with content that fits their needs
Users have varying ways of learning and processing information. Some of them learn better by discovering. Some of them need guidance until they earn confidence. Likewise, some prefer watching a tutorial video, while others are more into reading instructions. If we have content that meets their needs, we help them help themselves.
Our Business Assumptions
When we
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Help our users find success faster
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Reach their moment of activation
This results in
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Higher activation rates
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Improves retention
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More product adoption
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Higher value per customer / more referrals
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More purchases / greater value per purchase
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Decreased costs (support, acquisition)
Ø3 Proposed Solution: Personalized User Onboarding
The Importance Of Personalization
Users have varying needs
Users’ learning needs vary significantly. Our users have different roles, different levels of knowledge, different levels of technical experience, different backgrounds, and different goals. No two users will think about our product in the same way.
Improving activation by just 25%
can result in a 34.30% lift in monthly recurring revenue.
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Personalizing user onboarding is about understanding each user's journey toward reaching their goals of success.
A Phased Approach
Ø1
Ø3
Ø2
Ø4
Ø5
Discovery & Research
Define key goals and objectives
Industry research & best practices
Audit current processes
Map the entire user onboarding experience
Stakeholder input & approval
Onboarding MVP
Create interim email chain
Map Tour User Flow
Define tech requirements and measurements
The discovery phase of segmentation in tech aspect
Create content and designs for onboarding tour
Test the tour implementation in English
Segmented Onboarding
Define the needed survey data
Begin tech implementation
Test in one language
Begin analyzing the data
Segmented Email Chains
Create interim email chain
Map the user onboarding flow
Define tech requirements and measurements
The discovery phase of segmentation in tech aspect
Create content and designs for onboarding tour
Test the tour implementation in EN
Personalized Onboarding
Start defining onboarding tours based on collected data
Map out user flows
Define tech requirements
Create content and design
Test in one language
Optimize
The Expected Outcome
Provide a frictionless onboarding experience that is helpful, topical, and in context.
Give our users to have an understanding of our product’s value most shortly and easily.
Equip users with the information needed to use our core product successfully on their own (or know where to find this information quickly
and easily when needed). Also, allow them to explore functionalities at their own pace, without without overloading information.
Gather more data about our users’ behavior, their overall goal & activation events not only for optimizing the onboarding journey but also,
to personalize & improve the overall experience across our app.
Understand the needs & goals of each user group. Also understand the the easiest and most efficient way to achieve those goals,
and guide the users accordingly.
Build a flexible system that we can start implementing quickly and completing gradually.
Testing and Measurement Plan
What We Want to Learn To Build The Next Phase
We aim to understand our customer better so we can shape our product and our marketing to their goals and needs.
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Define our different customer segments
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Build psychographic profiles about our personas, including:
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User goals
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User jobs
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Motivations
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Activation events for each customer segment
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What do they like to buy and when
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Understand each segment’s individual journey toward reaching their goals of success.
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Understand what success looks like for each of these jobs and personas—why did they come to our app and what are they seeking to achieve? How do they use our product? We need to frame onboarding around achieving that success - AHA moment.
What We Want to Measure To Build The Next Phase
To understand if the new onboarding process solves our user goals & jobs we want to measure and set baselines for:
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Changes in support costs, including new user tickets
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Key decision-making points in the journey — What do customers do after they sign up? We gather the data and then we can start to measure true customer behavior, this then informs what we optimize and build next​
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- The effect on our revenue
- ​Activation rates (Signup -> First Invoice)
- Retention rates (CLV)
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Time to activation: how long does it take for a customer to release successfully?
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How does that vary based on customer segment/goals
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Which customer segments are purchasing what
Current Onboarding Experience In The App
We examined the current onboarding experience within the app before coming up with a brand-new solution, to see if there are some quick improvements we could start with.
Previous Experience In The App - A Very Limited Product Tour
Existing Onboarding Solution
While product tours can provide new users with valuable information, the number of people who take the time to go through them is never high. Most of the time, people simply use the “skip” feature or close a video and dive directly into using the app.
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People are impatient and don’t want to spend a lot of time on things they view as “useless” regardless of whether that assessment is accurate.
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Previous Email Solution
Key resources were broken up into 3 onboarding emails:
Music Distribution FAQs
Release Checklist
How - To Videos
Support Pages
Support Pages
YouTube Pages
This is intended as an interim solution so that we can continue to offer onboarding resources to the user.
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This is still not an effective way to guide users, as:
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It doesn't give the information within a context and may provide information that is not immediately relevant
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Users cannot find any of this information when they need it while struggling in the app
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Expecting users to leave the app, go back and find these emails and select the most relevant info is not realistic, and will cause drop-offs
Building A New Onboarding Experience
5 Pillars Of Our Proposed Solution
Segmantation
By collecting data at the start, we can understand the user goals and motivations, create a personalized experience, and map buying habits.
Email chains to motivate and excite users to get started with our product and see the product offering, personalized per persona.
Onboarding Tour
Give users a roadmap to success and guide them through it. Motivate users to complete and enjoy the crucial tasks to achieve their goals, as per their persona.
Self Learning
After users gain enough information and confidence about the product and the interface, let them accomplish their tasks by themselves.
Constant Optimization
In each phase, we gather more data, allowing us to draw insights about what is working or not, and then fine-tune our approach accordingly.
New User Onboarding Flow
Next, we have detailed the onboarding flow by pointing out goals for each step and suggesting different concepts by bringing together some best practices. In this stage, we brought together different needs from different departments /channels and integrated these different aspects into a single flow.
A Phased Approach
Ø1
Ø2
WELCOMING
ONBOARDING
Ø1
Ø3
Ø2
Ø4
Ø5
Discovery & Research
Define key goals and objectives
Industry research & best practices
Audit current processes
Map the entire user onboarding experience
Stakeholder input & approval
Onboarding MVP
Create interim email chain
Map Tour User Flow
Define tech requirements and measurements
The discovery phase of segmentation in tech aspect
Create content and designs for onboarding tour
Test the tour implementation in English
Segmented Onboarding
Define the needed survey data
Begin tech implementation
Test in one language
Begin analyzing the data
Segmented Email Chains
Create interim email chain
Map the user onboarding flow
Define tech requirements and measurements
The discovery phase of segmentation in tech aspect
Create content and designs for onboarding tour
Test the tour implementation in EN
Personalized Onboarding
Start defining onboarding tours based on collected data
Map out user flows
Define tech requirements
Create content and design
Test in one language
Optimize
New User Onboarding Flow
Next, we have detailed the onboarding flow by pointing out goals for each step and suggesting different concepts by bringing together some best practices. In this stage, we brought together different needs from different departments/channels and integrated these different aspects in a single flow.
Wireframes
I combined all the data gathered, and the deliverables I created, to design detailed high fidelity wireframes showing every possible flow, for both review meetings with other teams & guiding the UI Designer.
Ø4 Prototyping
Research
Proposed Solution
The prototyping phase included ​all Visual & UI Design work. My responsibility in this step was checking if screen designs were coherent with the style guide if all minor and major interactions are designed, briefing Icon Designer for icons needed in the tool, and making sure if the Icon Library is up to date, and delivering final designs to front-end developers.
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Ø5 Validating Internally
Ø2
When the UI process was done, my responsibility was to check it first with Product Managers and then with the Tech Team if there are any components that are not in or suitable to Style Guide. After the front-end work was done I validated the interface, to check if everything is correctly applied in front-end in terms of both UX & UI.
Ø6 Testing Externally
Ø7 Iteration
Last but not least, we iterated the whole process to release V2!
As the coming from the nature of Lean UX Design based on learning after releasing an MVP, before planning any improvements or releasing version 2 of the tool, we tested our tool on our clients. We arranged customer meetings with 25 users to gather their feedbacks after they use the tool. For showing breakdown results in table, we designed 2 different designs and conducted an A/B Test on different users. We reorganized our events to be sen on the new tool, to track relevant and detailed data for V2. All the data is updated in our Feedback documents, with the insights coming frequently from our CSMs.
Research
Proposed Solution
Ø2
Information Architecture
