Translations work management (SubConnect)
Onboarding design case study:
Or, how to help a thousand people learn how to use an enterprise product without training
First: the outcome
In three weeks, I designed, tested, delivered an onboarding feature for SubConnect, a new work management product.
It made training for the product completely obsolete. This led to our entire team to completely stop offering basic training, freeing up their time to work on more critical escalations. This was also a key contributor to the 85% 1st year adoption rate that SubConnect enjoyed.
I designed and executed everything in 3 weeks, including:
Information architecture and workflows, hi-fidelity screens/content/interaction design, all usability testing
The problem: the rule builder
The rule builder is a familiar component to many people using email. It's used to organize high volume of content into different containers using logical rules that the users provide. Here's the problem:
In SubConnect, the rule builder is used as a required first step in the product, creating containers called "Views".
And, the users are ALWAYS in a View, which is the inverse of how most people would normally experience this in email, where you only *optionally* organize email into groups or folders.
This difference in usage caused confusion. We even spoke with users who knows how to use it, but are still nervous about what it does. This hesitation was overwhelmingly the most negative sentiment expressed by users when introduced to the product. It was the biggest piece of friction, if not blocker to adoption, in the entire application.
The original rule builder design, which accommodates multiple rules connected by boolean logic
MVP over research
Since this was a low complexity but high uncertainty scenario for users, I focused on a quick MVP of an onboarding flow and rough screens. This design includes two small branching paths for users to create their rules: doing it manually or, in the most common use case, using a sharable code so they and their team can be looking at the same work.
Overall, I designed the flows and screens with several key principles in mind:
Be as short as possible, do not lose user attention
Force users to decide and pay attention when it counts.
Educate in one step, then let them play (Big concept from game design. Important!)
Use visuals in a data-heavy space to help guide users through purpose and decisions.
Early flows and proof of concept designs
Usability testing revealed that people could generally go through the onboarding and understand what they were supposed to learn. Good start, but opportunities for refinement existed:
Hiding next steps behind controls caused confusion
The language was too jargon-y and blunt
The playground/outcome had problematic visual design
The simple refinement
Refined flow and sample designs based on usability testing
I tweaked the flow in a tiny but significant way, bringing the decision making and the outcome for user choices into the same screen and making the consequences of their choice apparent in real time. Improvements were also made to the screens themselves in visuals and content:
Out: excessive attempts at cleverness
In: revamped visualizations that uses common language used on real teams to prime the users to think in the rule-builder logic. Throughout, I also brought visual language in line with the rest of the product.
This eases in a non-tech-savvy user in to figuring out how the rule-builder works, while placing no hinderance on power users who already knows how to use the component.
Learn by playing
The importance of Play: Finally, once the user arrives at the confirmation page, the choice that the user made is rendered in an instance of the actual rule builder UI. A reset option offers the safety of a sandbox.
Included in this is the semantic summary assists users understand the impact of boolean logic (Here, the difference between AND vs. OR)
This provides the user with a completely safe and transparent way to experiment with the entire rule builder.
A reset-able instance of the actual UI
SubConnect onboarding was an example of several small feature MVPs I designed against the backdrop of a much larger, complex design. While not very complicated, it completely eliminated any inquiries about the rule builder views from newly onboarding team members.
The time we freed from our end users’ (and training team's) day by making something previously complex completely intuitive and require no training to use, made for a significant win and opened the floodgates for much faster adoption.