Building an onboarding process for a green field product

This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully, which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach.
Photo by Riku Lu on Unsplash
Onboarding is an important part of B2C and pure "pay to play" SaaS. With so many tools to use, why would any user put effort into getting up and running? With B2B SaaS platforms that include professional services to get up and running then this isn't important. The same impact comes through the service that accompanies the product.

I have been lucky to experience a great onboarding experience when evaluating product management software for work. The best by a country mile was ProdPad. This had two elements, the first was the trial and flow to get up and running. The second was the emails the accompanied it. My previous post discussed the efforts to rectify the previous mistake, in getting email engagement up and running pre-launch, and how we use email in the onboarding process.
So the first decision was how to to go from registering an account to getting to the profile page. Should we create a blank slate and allow the users to build it up? Or should we go to a wizard process to collect details and finish with at least a partially complete profile? Given that the vision was to guide people we went with the wizard approach. 

Kick starting the experience

Next how could we kick start the process? Data entry is usually dull and most people already have some kind of CV or job/education history profile. How could we use this? Well, the most requested import in the beta survey was from LinkedIn. Luckily LinkedIn have a PDF profile download that we could use for the initial version of the registration process. 

 Because this is the first experience people are going to have of the app as a user we really wanted it to be the best it could be. So it was the first full user journey where we've created wire-frames. This has gone through a couple of iterations now and is taking shape. It's still a way off where I'd like it to end up, but given how little time we get to spend on it I'm happy with the framework we've built to go through the MVP process.

Lessons learned

The structural bits are relatively easy to get going. We know from the design what the profile will look like at the end. The next challenge is get the guidance and feedback for the content down, but for that we need to launch!

... which brings me onto the most important lesson from this phase. Delivering something now, when you probably won't have any users, is better than delivering "the perfect process" next year. When you probably still won't have any users but you could have built some up and got a year's worth of valuable feedback. 

 Also a great way to learn about onboarding is to do a product evaluation and try a number of products solving the same problem and meeting the same need. This really brought home to me how different ProdPad was. It also was interesting to see how empty space affects this experience. One of the products I used had a very minimal design. This looked great when it contained data, but as a new user and no data I felt a bit lost. Almost randomly clicking to find what to do next.

Further reading

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