Designing onboarding? Learning from Growth Design to help create better solutions
A popular design niche among startups can you find the right design solution
It wasn't until I began designing onboarding processes that I truly felt like a Product Designer.
Onboarding is an area where the interests of UX, Product, Data, and Business stakeholders collide. From a pure UX perspective, it's all about introducing the website's features and the necessary actions as seamlessly as possible.
However, since becoming a product designer, I've had to understand another point of view: the business viewpoint. There are specific metrics, like User Engagement, Acquistion, and Retention, that onboarding affects. Being aware of how the design affects these things is a crucial part of being able to talk with the Product team.
However, when doing this, I inadvertently stumbled into a sub-field of designers that focuses just on this: Growth Design.
Learning how they approach to design helped me learn how to not only get better at the onboarding process: it allowed me to become a better data-informed UX Designer.
Growth design and experimentation: blending UX and Business
Growth Design is a framework that provides visibility, prioritization, and insights to understand all stages of the customer journey and optimize each step.
The simplest way to think about Growth Design is it's a field working to do one thing: "Apply the scientific method to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)." For example, suppose the business cares most about the User Retention KPI. In that case, Growth Designers develop design ideas that might improve that KPI, which they prioritize, experiment, and analyze with.
A Growth Designer's job is to understand the customer journey and look for ways to optimize the user experience. They're not concerned about things like marketing campaigns or business tactics. Instead, they're simply following a simple process that blends UX and Data:
Analyze User/Data Insights to identify customer problems blocking major adoption themes like acquisition, engagement, and monetization
Attach problems to clear outcome metrics like Monthly Active Users (MAU) or paid conversion rates (Monetization rates)
Ideate on design solutions through user/customer research
Create hypotheses on how specific solutions can impact an outcome metric and by how much
Execute scientific tests to prove/disprove hypotheses
However, I didn't suddenly become a Growth Designer for no reason: I learned a bit about this process because much of what it touches on was vital to learning about the onboarding process of freemium products.
Onboarding and wearing the hat of a growth designer
How do you get users to buy a product you offer for free?
That was one of my challenges with creating the onboarding at a Product-Led Growth company. One of our significant challenges was getting users to upgrade their free plans to paid ones after they learned the ropes from the onboarding process.
It wasn't just me wearing multiple hats at a startup to got me to think this: the free plan suffered from poor UX due to the limitations of the plan. For example, users only had access to some of the data they usually would with a paid plan, so they were often greeted with a blank screen and no clear indication of what to do.
So part of the onboarding process wasn't just pointing out the product's features but also providing them with enough value on the free plan (with good UX) to get them to consider upgrading or talking with us further.
Regarding metrics, we were most concerned about user adoption: we wanted users to learn about and try out the features so they might be willing to migrate their existing documentation into our product (or pay for a subscription).
So there were several design solutions around the onboarding process that came from this:
An introductory video talking about the benefits
A "How it Works" page on the first login
A looping .G IF of the significant actions users could take
Creating a sandbox with dummy data for users to play around with
An e-mail campaign laying out features
Providing free documentation on the homepage for users to examine
Creating an overlay that pointed out features upon the first login
etc.
There was a solid rationale behind each design solution, but UX Design by itself couldn't determine which solution was best. This is why we needed the Growth Design approach of setting up experiments and testing them.
This is where setting up hypotheses matters. If you're not that familiar with how to set up a hypothesis, consider this one that comes from Designing with Data by Caitlin tan:
“If we do X, users will do Y because of Z, which will impact metrics A.”
For example, "If we create a looping . GIF of significant actions a user takes, users will be more willing to create an account because they can see what can be done with the product. Naturally, this will impact the number of user sign-ups and adoption rates."
It ties the different aspects we care about, our actions, user behaviors and motivations, and the impact on metrics that businesses also care about.
While there's a lot more complexity to this (which I touch on in my Data-Informed UX Design book), the most straightforward approach to getting answers is to set up A/B tests and run them. This is not only a cheap way to experiment: it can help you figure out the best solutions from real-time users.
However, before you jump into experimenting, we first need to understand one more concept: Impact.
Understanding impact/effort and what ideas to prioritize
If you've ever attended a product kickoff or a workshop, you've probably heard or seen an impact/effort matrix.
It's a 2 x 2 grid where the axes are split into impact and effort. The team often takes a list of features for the product and, after some debate, puts it up on a sticky in one of the four quadrants:
high-impact, low-effort (otherwise known as top priority)
high-impact, high-effort (otherwise known as major projects)
low impact, low effort (otherwise known as low priority)
low impact, high effort (otherwise known as do not do)
Doing this allows teams to prioritize which features matter due to their likely impact on the customers. Understanding the impact design solutions can have is usually done with a team. Still, there are certain intuitions you can make as a designer to consider which design solutions might be a higher priority.
For example, design solutions on the homepage, such as a GIF or a video, would reach more users than solutions you see after signing up and logging in. However, context-sensitive help options (like a tutorial once you log in) would have a more significant impact, as it offers guidance where the user needs it.
Understanding the impact actions have can also help to quantify it if your team uses prioritization methods like the RICE method.
However, the way you determine these things isn't to dive head-first into Metrics and Growth Design: it's to rely on the skills you've developed as a UX Designer (and an understanding of best practices) and add a little bit of user research.
Augmenting UX with Growth Design creates a valuable skill stack
The core skills of UX Design will always be valuable, but in this economy, UX isn't enough.
While you may or may not be interested in Growth Design as a whole, learning to use the skills and processes they take allows you to build your UX skill stack. In addition, it will help you understand what to do when UX and business overlap, like onboarding.
You only get to provide a first impression to users once, and onboarding them is not just about introducing them to the product's features: it's also about getting them to adopt and engage with it. As a result, you can significantly impact the business's bottom line by encouraging users to upgrade to the monetized plan.
So if you ever find yourself designing an introduction to your product, think about something other than the UX of what's happening here. Instead, spend some time understanding the growth experimentation mindset to understand how to design for the needs of both businesses and users.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Data and Design newsletter author. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.