Role: Director of Design and UX
SaaS Onboarding Redesign
Oliu is a B2B2C layered identity verification platform that gives organizations the ability to create and manage verification transactions for their customers. Originally developed as a credential management platform, the product was too advanced and had failed to generate recurring revenue.
One of the primary failures of the original experience was the convoluted process to onboard new customers – a flow that was suffering from both technical and UX issues – resulting in poor customer success and an extremely high drop-off rate (>50%).
Other identified issues:
- Too many steps with no perceived value
- Asking for too much personal information
- Required a separate mobile application to log in
- Technical problems giving inconsistent experiences
The before:
How might we
Redesign the product onboarding experience to improve customer success rates and increase revenue?
When designing an onboarding flow, a user needs to perceive value at each step. It is important to immediately build trust through clear communication and transparency.
In an onboarding flow, people need to know why they’re being asked for personal information, how the product intends to use it, and how the product handles security and ownership of that info.
We outlined three factors that would ensure we were meeting user expectations:
- Clearly communicating steps and actions
- Utilizing a modernized method of authentication (passwordless)
- Only including the minimum number of steps required
The after:
Testing
Out with the old
An onboarding experience must be easy to complete, or the product can be at risk of losing potential customers, negating growth and marketing efforts. Learning from the failures of the previous product experience, my team worked with stakeholders to break down the old onboarding flow.
In order to construct the flow of our MLP (“Minimum Lovable Product” – a term joyously used by the team), we asked the following questions:
- How long did the onboarding process take?
- What were the key points of failure?
- What was the minimum information required to onboard?
- What were the initial entry points? (organic, by invitation, etc)
10 Steps @ 03:34
Testing performed against the onboarding flow determined that the product was requesting too much information from users and had complex requirements for authentication that were resulting in high failure rates. Below were the steps in the original onboarding flow and the average time it took for users to complete each one.
Visit website
00:00
- Click “Get started”
Create an account
01:30
- Fill out personal information
- Fill out company information
- Fill out payment details
Receive login credential
01:34
- Navigate to the app store and download credential wallet
- Onboard to the credential wallet
- Use wallet to scan first QR code
- Accept credential into wallet
Log in
00:30
- Use credential wallet to scan second QR code
- Authenticate login request
Data received from our Sales team highlighted that customers were having issues with delays in receiving the login credential to their digital wallet, so we conducted timing tests to approve or disprove the data.
Tests proved that a significant delay was present in the time it took to receive the initial connection request between Oliu and the user’s digital wallet, with the average time being 23 seconds from the initial scan of the first QR code to receiving the login credential in the user’s digital wallet.
This outcome was less than ideal for our desired experience, so we opted to utilize a different method of passwordless login: magic links. Similar to other OTP (One Time Password) solutions, magic links instead send a unique login URL to a user’s email address that when clicked, authenticates them directly into the product.
Minimum Lovable Product
In With The New
One important lesson we learned was to not ask for payment details too early. Asking for payment details too early can deter potential customers, as evident by our failure to produce ARR.
We chose instead to let people use the product for free in a limited sandbox environment, only asking for payment details when they were ready to expand their access. Allowing potential customers to become invested in the product allowed them to confidently make a more informed financial decision.
Through ongoing cross-functional collaboration between product, design and engineering, we determined that there were only two necessary pieces of information required for someone to use our product:
- Email address – Method of delivering a magic link for user authentication
- Company name – Method of contact for customer success and sales outreach teams
Putting our newly established Figma style library to the test ensured consistency and a cohesive experience. Read my AppX case study for more information.
Use Cases
Supporting the user
When building out a user flow for any new website or application, it’s important to ensure you design for every possible outcome that a user may encounter. This is especially important in early and mid-stage products.
We worked closely with engineering to answer key UX questions:
- What happens if the user leaves mid-way through a specific task?
- What happens if they wait too long before moving on to the next step?
- What happens if they try to repeat a task in rapid succession?
- What happens if they click before something finishes loading?
Solving for as many use cases as possible ensures that our users can confidently navigate through the experience while avoiding loops and dead ends.
Various flows we solved for:
- Allowing all users to log in using a magic link
- Allowing all users to send a new magic link at login after the first one fails
- Asking for a company name when new users complete their sign up and reach the dashboard
- Authenticating invited users by asking them to confirm their email address
- Showing an error message to all users who attempt to log in using an expired magic link
Results
Timing Is Everything
Within the first quarter of release, we saw positive results across all three of our project KPIs.
Time-to-value
By reworking the onboarding user flow, we successfully reduced our TTV score by over 80%, bringing the onboarding time down from 3.5 mins to ~40 secs.
New onboarding flow (4 steps)
00:40
- Visit website and click “Try for free”
- Enter email address to receive magic link
- Navigate to email and click magic link
- Enter company name
Customer success
By determining the key point of failure and removing it, we achieved a 100% success rate for new sign-ups, eliminating the previous drop off rate of 50%.
Conversion
We successfully kickstarted an ARR stream by converting sandbox users into paying customers within the first quarter post-launch and supporting the product’s acquisition.
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