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Enhancing the New User Experience

Enhancing the New
User Experience

How did we transform the onboarding experience for new users, and what were the key challenges and solutions?

My Role

My Role

  • Lead Designer

  • Interaction Designer

Duration

Duration

4-6 weeks

Year

Year

2023

fig 1.0 New User Journey Design

Background

Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is like a magical tool that helps you manage this network easily. It simplifies tasks like setting up new devices, managing policies, and troubleshooting issues.

Challenge

New users are facing significant challenges in navigating our product's complex features and setting up their instances. The steep learning curve and intricate policy configurations are leading to frustration and delayed productivity, impacting over 2,000 customers.

Goal

User Goal

Easily set up user's product instance and explore functionalities through a guided onboarding journey

Business Goal

Reduce onboarding time and increase user engagement with a clear and informative setup process

Solution

To address these challenges, we implemented an interactive, step-by-step onboarding solution. This comprehensive guide simplifies complex configurations, clarifies technical terms, and highlights new features.

As a result, we achieved a 40% faster user adoption rate and a 60% increase in user satisfaction.

Usability Testing

Feedback from Usability Testing **

Our Cisco network administrators (a subset of our large user base) who use our products to configure, manage, troubleshoot and deploy policies to their fabrics, graciously agreed to answer questions and give us feedback on what is that they are expecting in an onboarding experience and what are their concerns currently.

Through usability testing, we identified user pain points in setting up the instance.

This research helped me develop empathy for our users and understand their desired experience.

According to our usability testing, 60% of users provided the following feedback:

Cumbersome Configuration

New user onboarding takes 25 minutes, while existing users still face a 15 minutes setup process, creating friction in the early user experience

Limited Product Knowledge

New users struggle to navigate setup while simultaneously grasping complex product concepts. This creates confusion and hinders a smooth onboarding experience

New Features Awareness Gap

Users rely on release notes to learn about new features, indicating they might miss out on functionalities if they don't actively seek out updates.

Competitive Analysis

I conducted a thorough analysis of onboarding experiences across various apps and websites (refer 1.2). I meticulously examined how different industries approached welcoming new users, paying close attention to the techniques employed, the information conveyed, and the overall user experience. This research allowed me to identify industry best practices and pinpoint areas for potential improvement in our own onboarding process.

fig 1.2 Competitive Analysis

Key Findings from Competitive Analysis

Key Findings

The competitive analysis helped me understand how our competitors welcomed and onboarded their users and also the best practices to follow. We decided to focus on the following points -

Welcome the User

  • Greet the user

  • Humanize the text language

  • Explain common concepts/words used in the product

Make Configuration Path Easy

  • Reinforce easy configurations

  • Easy navigations to and from the onboarding screen

Track Setup Progress

  • Keep users informed of the progress

Welcome the User

  • Greet the user

  • Humanize the text language

  • Explain common concepts/words used in the product

Make Configuration Easy

  • Reinforce easy configurations

  • Easy navigations to and from the onboarding screen

Track Setup Progress

  • Keep users informed of the progress

Explorations

Following several brainstorming sessions, constructive debates between the designers and the cross functional teams, we explored different options and narrowed it down to 3 which made the most sense to everyone given the release dates and tight deadlines.

Challenges

Following are the challenges we faced while iterating

Welcome the User

  • Greet the user

  • Humanize the text language

  • Explain common concepts/words used in the product

Make Configuration Easy

  • Reinforce easy configurations

  • Easy navigations to and from the onboarding screen

Track Setup Progress

  • Keep users informed of the progress

Final Designs

After all the explorations and addressing the challenges, we successfully crafted the designs!

The Welcome

We designed an onboarding greeting flow to guide new users through the platform, explaining key concepts and navigation features.

The Greeting

Upon logging in, users are met with a friendly screen that welcomes them and offers an introduction to the product. Refer fig 1.3

fig 1.3 The Greeting

The Terminology

Guiding users through the platform's terminology and vocabulary to enhance their understanding. Refer fig 1.4

fig 1.4 The Terminology

The Product Features

Bringing attention to crucial features and specifying their positions within the product interface. Refer fig 1.5

fig 1.5 The Product Features

Getting Started

Creating an interactive experience to encourage users to explore the platform and gain a deeper understanding.

The Steps

The interactive guided steps help users to setup their system without worrying about the order of configuration to ensure error-free deployments. Refer fig 1.6

fig 1.6 The Steps

The Step Explanations

On hover of each step, users will find two actions,
- "Go" will take them to the configuration screen and help configure the object

- "Tell Me More" would slide in a panel with thorough explanations of how the features work and the specific steps users should follow to get started. Refer fig 1.7

fig 1.7 The Step Explanation

The Journey Progress

"Getting Started Progress" will help the user to save their progress and come back to the journey to complete the remaining steps. fig 1.8

fig 1.8 The Journey Progress

The Toast

Whenever the user wants to configure an object on a step, after they save the configuration they will see this toast to help them come back to the journey. Refer fig 1.9

fig 1.9 The Toast

What's New

Users can now discover the latest features in the release and leverage suggestions to explore the product further

The Hero Feature

Users get to explore the most important feature of the new release. Refer fig 1.10

fig 1.10 The Hero Feature

The Other Features

Theres a way to also try out other features that are new to the release. Refer fig 1.11

fig 1.11 The Other Features

Release Updates and Notes

Users can also get acquainted with all the additional updates and release notes for more details. Refer fig 1.12

fig 1.12 Release Updates and Notes

Feature Prototype

Impact

After numerous iterations with all the stakeholders, when the designs were finalized, our product manager and technical marketing engineering team utilized them to gather feedback from our customers at Cisco Live. Our research team calculated the following results and impact.

35%

Ease of Configuration

40%

Better Product Knowledge

25%

Visibility of New Features

Conclusion

In conclusion, our goal to help new users learn our product through a guided setup process has been successful. By clearly showing them where to find key features and explaining the terms, we've made onboarding better.

Our approach has led to new users feeling comfortable with the system 40% quicker than before, and we've seen a 60% increase in their satisfaction with how easy it is to learn the product. These results show that our efforts to streamline the onboarding process are effectively helping new users get up to speed quickly and use our product more efficiently.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.