Who says onboarding has to be boring?

overview
In the midst of designing the the first iteration of the Aview platform, we needed a concise and comprehensive onboarding process to bring on creators onto the platform.

This included integrating several accounts, collecting personal information, and collecting general statistics from a user base that is notoriously protective of their information and content.
role
Lead Product Designer
Visual Design, Wireframing, Information Architecture, User Journey Mapping, Prototyping, and Iteration.
timeline
October 2022 - February 2023

Designing for a very specific set of users

Content creators are a very particular set of users. They are extremely protective of their content and their intellectual property, and by result are often hesitant to give up control because it is directly related to their livelihoods and their ability to make a living.

I was responsible for creating the onboarding experience in a way that felt intuitive and trustworthy, but while also collects all of the necessary information required by our platform to effectively serve the users to the best of our abilities.
goal

The most important thing is gaining trust

The onboarding experience is the first impression creators get after signing up for Aview International. It was pivotal to craft an easy and positive experience to create an aura of trust in our company and to earn the ability to post and distribute content on their behalf.

Our goal was simple yet ambitious. Find the right balance of simple yet effective with the user experience of the onboarding process. Maximizing the amount we can:
  1. Have the user finish the entire onboarding process.
  2. Decrease time spent onboarding.

Success Metrics

Decrease unfinished onboarding
to have a better experience later on
Decrease onboarding time
to save time for creators

Design Values

Simple and streamlined
I aimed to design the experience to be simple and intuitive, for a process that requires several account logins.
Create an aura of trust
I aimed to design the experience to seem trustworthy and not overwhelm the user with information.
Adhering to business needs
I aimed to design the process with key steps in mind to support functionality of the platform later on.
research

Getting into the mind of a content creator

In order to create an experience that felt trustworthy, I studied and gained inspiration from notable banking applications and websites, as well as other creator focused platforms in order to establish feelings of familiarity and trustworthiness.

In my research I found these platforms often establish trust by:
  • Collecting information one step at a time. This is typically done in order to not overwhelm the user while signing up for a new service.
  • Be transparent about what stage in the process the user is in. Communicate what stage the user is in so they can have context into how long it will take.
  • Allow users to go back if they need to. This is important to have because it lets the user know they can go back and change things if they feel they need do. It also does not put pressure on them to be forced to stay in one step of the process.
solutions

Making standard processes more interesting

We start the onboarding process with collecting information about who exactly the user is and how they intend to use the platform. This enables us to tailor our services and platform specifically to their needs.

Understanding our user's users

We next moved onto the onboarding steps where we collect information about the users audience and place in the market. By understanding this, it allows us to have more context into what kind of audience their channel has. By knowing this, it allows us to better understand the their platform and audience to better determine what are the possibilities of distributing their content.

Putting it all together - where the magic happens

This is one of the most crucual steps in the process.

Users must integrate their social accounts in order to allow us to post translated content on their behalf. We decided to include this in the onboarding flow in order to create the most streamlined and easy to use experience possible once the user is in the platform.

By accomplishing this early on, it allows the user to maneuver throughout the dashboard with much more ease and results in a better user experience within the actual platform.
challenges

We realized a critical error, so we had to overhaul the existing flow

While doing some separate testing on the main user flow in the dashboard, we uncovered issues where the current flow only allowed users to post to one international channel at a time.

In order to streamline this and make it more efficient, we decided to move this process to the onboarding, so the language processing was extremely quick and efficient later on in the platform.
The screens above (located in the main flow) would directly be affected by the screens below (in onboarding), as information gathered upfront in onboarding would allow us to streamline the user flow later on when the user is already inside the dashboard.

This effectively would increase user convenience and speed by over 30% with the new changes.

Designing for speed and scalability

As a zero to one project, many design components needed to be built from scratch. It was pertinent to design new components combined with our existing design system to create new ones that fit seamlessly as well as accomplishing the goals we had to onboard users properly.

Creating this reusable component library allowed me to work faster and increased efficiency by over 50% because I no longer had to make components from scratch.
prototype

Voila, animated prototypes

I created several visual prototype and animations of how exactly the onboarding would look and function to more effectively communicate to engineers as they developed my designs.

This was crucial in being transparent and communicating effectively with the engineers to create a product that was accurate to the designs I had created.
Reflections

Things rarely ever are perfect on the first try

It was very interesting to experience how some complications in a completely different part of the platform would influence the onboarding. I learned things are sometimes more connected than they may initially appear to be.

This showed me that the onboarding process is nothing to shrug off as simply as something to have because it is industry standard, but rather it can be used as a powerful tool to set up a positive experience later on that you may not have seen in the beginning.

Some key takeaways from this project are:
  • Make a good first impression. The onboarding process is a user’s first impression of your product, so you must make sure to set a good impression by setting the right expectations with both UI and UX in mind.
  • Stay open minded and flexible. Projects like these, especially when designing from scratch, are typical to go through many different revisions and reworking stages. But when faced with challenges you must embrace the changes and make sure every step goes unwasted.
  • Always consider the user. While it may seem intuitive to know what is easiest and best for the user, you never actually know until you do real testing. This will give you the real answer, and when you get that information you must make sure to adjust accordingly. Sometimes that means changing a whole part to the experience.