Outreach
Onboarding designed to scale
I led design and research for Outreach’s first in-product onboarding experience, designed to scale with the growth of the company. The experience reduced user setup time by 2x and increased the likelihood new users would become weekly active users by 300%.
What I did
Product design
User research
Prototyping
Workshops
Stakeholder management
Team + stakeholders
Product manager
Engineers
Onboarding specialists
Education team
Sales
Leadership
Launch
June 2018
How can we make new users successful, faster?
That was the question that kicked off Outreach's onboarding initiative. Currently, a team of Onboarding Specialists helped new users get set up and trained on the product. But Outreach’s rapid growth and continued expansion to smaller companies — where one-on-one training was not practical — caused this process to break down.
I worked with a Product Manager to understand the problems facing new users and define the tasks within the onboarding experience we would bring into the product. Then, working across six teams, I designed an experience that would be scalable, customizable, and help us increase user adoption.
Addressing invite issues
The first step of onboarding, our invite email, often got stuck in spam, expired before a user took action, or was ignored.
To address these issues, we fixed the spam issues, exposed the expiration window, automatically resent invites, and included a manager's name in the subject line.
Paving the way for customization
This simple questionnaire mimicked the first question asked by an Onboarding Specialist to determine the features and settings to cover.
Prioritizing painful tasks
We brought the most frustrating and universal tasks such as connecting a user’s email and calendar into the product.
User validation
Designs were validated through impression tests. Key learnings included the importance of success screens (shown here) for user motivation.
First-run experience
What happens the first time a user sees our product? Our team brainstormed many possibilities before deciding on a product tour due to time constraints.
The tour points out the most important parts of our product in terms sales reps are familiar with.
“The onboarding flow has made every Client Engagement Manager's life easier. Instead of spending 20 minutes explaining to each user how to setup their email and calendar, we can now focus on optimizing a salesperson's workflow during trainings.”
Shelbi Luchini
Customer Engagement Manager, Outreach
Impact
300% ↑
Likelihood new users become weekly active users
2x↓
User setup time
40%↑
Click through rate on invite email
Results 4 months post-launch