User Onboarding - 1st time user experience

Role: Product Designer, Lead

Objective: The goal of this project was to help decrease the learning curve for first time users. Static screens would appear once logged in, walking users through the platform. Users would have the option to skip and revisit later or continue.

Deliverables: Low fidelity and high fidelity design with copy.

New technology often comes with a learning curve. Class was built on top of Zoom so that users had recognizable patterns and features they could interact with. The Class feature set includes teaching tools, breakout rooms, whiteboard and many others. For first time users, this can be very overwhelming to be presented with all these features with no introduction on how to use them. 

Research

Upon diving into UI design for the first time user experience I did some research around onboarding. I did this to gain understanding of the importance of onboarding and potentially get stakeholder buy-in. External research was conducted through the use of academic scholarly articles.


Based on research, first impressions matter, even within digital experience. The first few moments of interaction between users and a platform can make or break the relationship. This is the time when a user is evaluating the value of the product and how it helps them accomplish their goals. 

Low fidelity designs

Low fidelity designs were created initially to cover having an in-app tutorial experience. Users joined their first class session then were prompted with a popup telling them about the tutorial and they could choose to continue or skip it and come back later.


Instructor vs. student experience

In the initial low fidelity designs, I created flows for both the instructor experience and the student experience. The flows were based on personas that we had drafted prior and the tasks we wanted them to be able to complete in the app.

Instructor experience


User Goals

  • Sign in and attend all scheduled sessions

  • Collaborate appropriately with other students during class

  • Communicate verbally and non-verbally with instructors in real-time

Student experience

Upon presenting the low fidelity designs to key stakeholders, it was decided that going the “in-app” route would be too much of a technical lift at the time.

Creating an onboarding featured that lived within the platform after a user joined a class session would have taken a lot of effort and needed a lot of developer support.

High impact, high effort

High impact, low effort

  • Research can be done in the form of secondary or “desk research”, to help inform decisions when other forms of research are not an option.

  • Getting technical feedback early on is important and doing so in the low fidelity design phase is more feasible than designing for high fidelity and finding out that it will not work from a technical standpoint.

  • The final decision was to go the “high impact, low effort” route with static images and short blurbs of text. This also would have been a cross functional effort with marketing to create the final image visuals.

Takeaways