Optimizing Onboarding
Prentus is a B2C, B2B, SaaS platform for job seekers and tech boot camp cohorts. Prentus offers many unique and impactful features including community pages, application tracking, AI career coaching, and gamification. These features streamline the application process and set job seekers up for expedited success.
My Role
Company
Team
Time Frame
Overview
Challenge
While Prentus has many unique, and engaging high-value features, our client was concerned that their presence, purpose, and function were unclear to first-time users. The client was concerned this confusion was negatively impacting the following performance metrics:
Engagement rate
Adoption rate
Free trial conversion rate
Overall user experience and user job placement success
Our client reached out to us to test and redesign Prentus' current onboarding user experience to evaluate and tackle these concerns.
Solution
Through user testing and comparative analysis of industry leaders in onboarding practices, my team and I redesigned Prentus’ onboarding strategy and first-time user experience by:
Redesigning onboarding user flows to prioritize high-value features to decrease the users' time to value
Aligning onboarding with the platform's established gamification patterns
Increasing user choice in the onboarding process
Designing a landing page dashboard to decrease user cognitive load, highlight high-value features, and establish user habits
Define
Team Kickoff
Our team of five designers began by familiarizing ourselves with the Prentus platform. We collaboratively sketched user flows of Prentus' existing onboarding user experience and noted all platform features. We then developed a series of clarifying questions for our client that addressed uncertainties around specific platform features, and project scope.
Client Communication
As the Prentus platform offers both B2B and B2C interfaces, each with unique features, we needed to clarify the project scope and define which side of the product would be addressed in the present design cycle. Based on existing user retention metrics we recommended prioritizing the onboarding of job seekers and our client agreed. Through our additional client communications, we identified the following initial concerns:
Users may not be aware of high-value features (Chrome Extension, gamification features, AI-powered interview coaching, and LinkedIn review) before their free trial ends (reducing satisfaction and ultimately conversion rates).
Onboarding was not aligned with gamification patterns established elsewhere in the platform.
User Testing
Research Objectives
This phase of user testing aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Prentus’ existing onboarding process. We wanted to be intentional with our user testing to ensure data produced would be relevant to this objective. Developing a detailed user testing plan and script allowed us to do so. Our first step was to define guiding research objectives:
What areas of the onboarding flow are cumbersome, redundant, or unnecessary?
How effectively do the intro video and product tour prepare job seekers to use Prentus and leverage its unique features?
How intuitive and engaging is the onboarding checklist sequence?
Are users able to easily navigate through the website to complete tasks?
Testing Strategy
Script Development
Keeping the above research objectives in mind, we developed a 34 question interview script centered around four tasks. As we knew we would be testing in an unmoderated environment we took extra care to evaluate each question for clarity and leading nature.
User Testing Recruiting
Based on Prentus’ user demographics we determined that recruiting active job seekers of any age and previous job experience would yield the most relevant insight.
Methods
All recruiting and testing was performed through UserTesting.com.
Analysis
User Testing Report
In all, we conducted 11 remote, unmoderated testing sessions. Testers were all job seekers and varied in age from 21 to 68. These 11 sessions generated over 5 hours of video footage, producing qualitative and quantitative data. We then summarized this data using a spreadsheet delineating each research question in order to maximize consistency across researchers.
As a group we collaborated to identify overarching themes among user testers, taking care to list pain points, successes, and user takeaways. From this list, we then prioritized our findings by urgency: Critical, Major, Minor, and Observation, and proposed solutions.
We presented our analysis to our client to discuss the feasibility, cost, and product alignment of our proposed initial solutions to ensure our iterative design process would be heading in a productive direction.
Ideation
Building a Design System
It was important that any new copy, designs, and UI were consistent with the current Prentus style guide. A formal style guide did not exist so we created one based on the styling already present on the live site.
With collaboration with the client, we removed inconsistencies and accessibility issues we identified throughout the site. All updates were based on a thorough review of industry UI patterns and WCAG accessibility standards.
Dashboard Design
I spearheaded the dashboard designs and related onboarding (dashboard tour) while my teammates tackled onboarding material for the community, job board, and job tracking pages. I began by iterating with sketches and low-fidelity wireframes.
Sketches
Starting with quick sketches allowed me to iterate through multiple designs inspired by common dashboard UI patterns. As I iterated I regularly consulted our user testing findings to ensure new designs were informed by user needs.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
I then presented the low-fidelity wireframes below to the team and as a group, we chose to move forward with option B. We moved forward on this design because it allowed the Welcome Checklist to have UI and location continuity. It also allowed for the most user customization due to the consistency of widget sizing.
Design
Tour Microcopy
I then iteratively designed four widgets and accompanying text copy for the dashboard tour.
When designing the dashboard widgets I maximized site learnability by prioritizing consistency across how these tools appeared on the dashboard and elsewhere on the site.
Developing the dashboard tour copy required me to find an appropriate line between informative and efficiency. The previously identified user pain points and wins shaped the content addressed.
High Fidelity Mockups and Protyping
With client and team feedback in mind, I iterated on moving my low fidelity mockups into high fidelity wireflows.
After additional back and forth with our client I collaborated with the design team to create a high fidelity, clickable protype to serve as the foundation for additional user testing.
Reflection
Looking Back
Redesigning the onboarding experience for a platform that offers such a wide variety of impactful features all with the purpose of setting users' up for a successful job search was incredibly rewarding. Our onboarding redesigns will allow first-time users to feel more empowered to utilize Prentus to its fullest, leading to their own successful job search journey and increased free trial conversion rates.
Due in part to the platform's complexity, the inherited designs had several accessibility issues and UI inconsistencies. I did not initially evaluate these inherited designs for accessibility which resulted in some backtracking. From this experience, I realized that evaluating inherited designs for accessibility standards is an important first step that will result in saved time and better design deliverables in the long. Working in an agile environment was crucial to finding success throughout the project, particularly in the face of these initial accessibility and UI inconsistencies.
Next Steps
Due to the project's scope, I only designed the dashboard as it would appear in a first-time user onboarding (blank) state. An important and exciting next step would be to address the dashboard's ideal and partial states to reflect user experience beyond the onboarding state.
