Matthew Design

The Portfolio of Matthew Almand

Case Study

Getting Started

A better onboarding experience and the establishment of proper tracking analytics.

Platform

Digital.ai Agility Application 

Request

To improve the onboarding experience for new users, trial users, and role-based users. To provide a “quick & dirty” step to getting users signed in and working within X number of minutes.

Goals

  1. Minimal dev time (development is costly and requires planning, testing, and one or more releases.) Hopefully fit within a single release cycle. Two at most.
  2. Establish an example case of using Pendo Metrics tracking to properly measure UX improvement with real data based on success criteria.
  3. Utilize existing resources – The overview page is a pretty static (except for localization) HTML/CSS/JS page by changing around this page and adding in needed content we remain from the technical perspective in the same place. In addition, there already exists reviewed and edited content on the subject matter in the help documentation that can be lifted and linked to as needed.
  4. Satisfy upper management’s desire for progress in regards to onboarding. 

Team

Project Manager, Lead Developer, Project Lead, Designer 

My Role

UX/UI Designer

Project Status

Released (gathering metrics)

UX Phases

High-Fidelity Mocks, Baseline Metrics, Metric Analysis

Section #1: Planning & Design

Key Changes

The key difference in the before / after in overview changes are:

  1. Page is designed to provide directed tasks to roles, yet continues to supply the existing content for both first-time visitors and system setup procedures.
  2. Leveraging existing guides from documentation but bring it front and center for the user to easily find.
  3. Get team members to teamrooms quickly.
  4. Suggest and link to tasks based on roles.
  5. Maintain LNF for the current interface but introduce some new elements that crossover to the new unified design system. 

Outstanding Questions

Some questions for later:

  1. Should we track the last tab a user was on and save that to their session. So that each time they return to this page they see the tab they left off on?
  2. Pendo tracking strategy, What additional insights can we gain from how users interact with this page?
  3. How to measure success in more than one way? The expected measure is pathing to the appropriate task from a role. We look to increase the metric from a current baseline to a higher percentage.

Addressing Current Problems

Digital.ai Agility has a rather spartan and limited onboarding process that focuses more on the first-time setup than really helping users get to work. Here are the user issues with the current Getting Started view:

  1. The first tab “intro video” is only valuable the first time a user begins using the application as the video is introducing the product and what it does. 
  2. The most valuable tab the “What’s New” section is currently the last tab on the far right.
  3. The Import your Backlog link is buried in a paragraph of text on the third tab and according to the baseline metrics it had not been clicked between Jan 2021 and March 2021.
  4. The admin has a whole dedicated section in the app, so there is no value for this tab.
  5. The links at the bottom of the page are outdated and even worse, refer to videos of older versions of the product creating a potentially negative experience.
  6. None of the content tells users where to go or how to begin they are simply left to figure it out.

Roles

For this refresh of the Getting Started, we want to focus on some target roles and help them by suggesting ways to get started. 

Team Members / Product Teams – The key missing piece in today’s view of the page is showing users how to get to their TeamRooms. While there are a couple of other options for them to choose the key is to show them the TeamRoom panel and a list of rooms they are a member of. Once this behavior is learned and teams have a URL open they will not need further onboarding for the majority of their work.

Scrummaster / Product Owners – These users have more options on how to begin working so we want to present them with suggested first steps.

Design Decisions

As digital.ai moves closer to a unified visual experience we begin to introduce some of the new concepts, iconography, and visuals into the Application. In addition, I have moved the tabs along the left side down from the top since we are increasing the standard four tabs to six. This will also provide us with the ability to add more in the future if we choose to do so and can be more explanatory with the tab naming.

Early Version of the Product Owner's Tab

Section #2: Pendo Tracking

Tracking Strategy

Introducing new content and links means we can now track users through funnels (click paths) within Pendo. This will tell us if users are successfully flowing through the paths we established for them.

Pendo is a powerful tracking tool that helps us know how users flow from page to page in the Application

Creating a baseline

To understand if our changes are successfully increasing user traffic to the desired locations we first need to gauge how often users are actually going to the destinations we intend given the current Getting Started view.

For example how many first-time users are clicking on the Teamrooms panel icon as their next step once they arrive on the Getting Started page?

From the baseline funnel 8% are finding the Rooms icon in the side panel

While Pendo cannot tell us why someone is clicking on a link we can at least compare the number of the baseline (today’s value) with the future value (our newly created funnel) to see if the number increases. If it does in fact increase, we can say that our changes and therefore effort in introducing these changes have improved from before the changes. So that would mark the effort as successful. While it can be assumed (without Pendo) that mentioning roles and links to paths that did not previously exist would improve the chances of users finding these intended destinations without Pendo tracking we would not have an actual real number to back this up.

Section #3: Results & Follow up

Measuring Success

Since the release of the updated Getting Started page, Pendo has been set up with funnels to the intended destinations of the links mentioned previously. 

Once 30 to 60 days have passed since the change was added we will be able to compare the stats and see if, in fact, the increase happened.

Initial baseline stats showed:

  • 8% of users clicked on the TeamRoom icon in the sidebar 
  • Of those users, only 50% of users clicked on a specific TeamRoom from that list
  • This equals only 4% of first-time users since January 1, 2021, who have gone from the Getting Started Page to a TeamRoom successfully.

With this new funnel and the changes to the metrics, we will be able to tell the story and back it up with data of how the Getting Started changes have improved the experience for our end-users thus fulfilling the goals set by upper management.

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