When thinking about onboarding, you can\u2019t just consider<\/a> a customer\u2019s first day \u2013 you have to think in weeks, months, years, far beyond the first impression. Throughout the whole journey, your customer needs a cohesive experience so they ultimately feel confident in your product, which means it can\u2019t be a box-ticking exercise for one team, but rather a constant concern for multiple teams.<\/p>\n However, creating that cohesive onboarding experience when responsibility is distributed across a company is not always easy \u2013 especially with cross-functional teams spread across offices and timezones. That conundrum is particularly pronounced when your product meets complex business needs.<\/p>\n We discovered this the hard way \u2013 with no one team to own a holistic onboarding for all of Intercom, our onboarding experience began to reveal the seams of our organization across different moments in time. Within Intercom itself, a customer\u2019s onboarding experience was splintered across various parts of the app.<\/p>\n Product teams often found themselves resorting to one-off patterns to support a certain product launch here or there, using inconsistent guiding principles to make onboarding-related product decisions, and using a slightly different tone from our partners in Sales and Customer Engagement, who play key roles throughout a customer\u2019s onboarding.<\/p>\n Onboarding in one part of the app (Platform tab)<\/p><\/div>\n Onboarding splintered in another part of the app (Messages tab)<\/p><\/div>\n Example of a one-off pattern to support a specific launch<\/p><\/div>\n How do you empower different product teams and functions \u2013 like Sales and Customer Engagement \u2013 to input into onboarding, but still come out with a unified, comprehensive onboarding experience that helps customers quickly see value and stay engaged over time?<\/p>\n To answer that question, we made a few big changes, some organizational and some methodological.<\/p>\n We knew we needed to paper over the cracks that had built up over the years, so we did the \u201cobvious\u201d thing and formed a product team \u2013 Team Onboarding \u2013 dedicated to overseeing Intercom\u2019s end-to-end onboarding experience.<\/p>\n This might seem contradictory. Weren\u2019t we committed to making sure everyone felt a degree of accountability for our onboarding? In fact, while this approach might seem like we were centralizing and concentrating the responsibility for onboarding on one team and removing it from others, the reality was the opposite.<\/p>\n Team Onboarding worked with various teams, like Sales and Marketing, to craft a scalable, long-term onboarding narrative and vision for Intercom. In practice, the team empowered all other product teams to easily contribute and own aspects of the onboarding flow while aligning with an overall strategy and narrative. This way, our customers could benefit from a cohesive end-to-end onboarding experience that was a shared responsibility across all our product teams.<\/p>\n Building a cohesive end-to-end onboarding experience is more than merely an organizational issue, however. We needed to entirely rethink how we presented our onboarding, and consider not just our present needs but also how they might change.<\/p>\n We devised two key components to deliver on that vision.<\/p>\n The modular onboarding framework we devised was inspired by video game tutorials and skill trees, which start simple, build on themselves, and incrementally expose gamers to the complexity of the video game.<\/p>\n To that end, we crafted a seemingly simple but powerfully flexible framework, made up of a series of levels which contain discrete steps. We wanted the levels and steps in our onboarding framework to start with the basics, and then gradually and progressively guide our customers towards becoming confident power users of Intercom.<\/p>\n Each level in the framework has a clear objective and success metric, and includes a sequence of steps to:<\/p>\n After completing a level, customers should feel like they understand what the concept is, why it\u2019s important and where to go in the future to do more.<\/p>\n Each step within a level follows certain design patterns, depending on the goal of the step and when a customer might encounter the step within their Intercom journey (i.e. have they just signed up, or is this their 10th time signing into Intercom?).<\/p>\n In creating unified patterns to best help customers learn these concepts, we leveraged education principles like \u201cscaffolding\u201d and \u201clearning by doing\u201d to focus a customer\u2019s initial learning within the environment of Onboarding Home. These are techniques to fast-track understanding without overwhelming users, before gradually guiding them to complete steps contextually in various parts of the product, after they\u2019ve gained more confidence.<\/p>\n These levels are grouped and ordered by increasing complexity and specificity of customer needs: starting with the most basic bare bones fundamentals of Intercom, to the necessary setup required for a certain use case, to more specific concepts like optimizing or automating workflows.<\/p>\n Every product serves different users with different needs, so if you were to adopt a similar framework, you\u2019ll have to put a lot of thought and attention into grouping and ordering the levels to best reveal the value in your own product.<\/p>\n To make the environment approachable and familiar for a new user, especially in the first few moments when they\u2019re interacting with our product, we worked closely with our partners outside of the product team.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because we knew our in-product onboarding flow had to be strongly connected with the sales and marketing narrative to reinforce the value that customers signed up for. This allowed us to create a cohesive end-to-end customer experience that was still adaptable enough for a wide variety of use cases.<\/p>\n Establishing these guiding principles was key to ensuring the modularity and extensibility of the onboarding framework. Based on these guidelines, other teams can now easily create onboarding content for their use case or feature while still ensuring a cohesive end-to-end customer journey that ties back to to a single strategy and overall onboarding narrative.<\/p>\n Thinking about the elements of onboarding in terms of a design system means considering how it will work in the long term. From the start, you\u2019ll want to future proof your framework and make sure other product teams can easily use it. For instance, while we were designing the specific levels and steps that would go into our Onboarding Home release, we also used the framework to design reusable components, guidelines and design principles.<\/p>\n Drawing on learnings from having a centralized Design Systems<\/a> team, we put together guiding resources to enable other teams to build on top of our onboarding system. This includes a checklist of when to add features to Onboarding Home, a set of onboarding patterns and guidelines to follow when doing so, templates for creating levels and steps and examples of do\u2019s and don\u2019ts. These are living breathing tools that link directly to components in our codebases and design tools, so PMs, designers and engineers across the company can plug and play into a cohesive onboarding experience as easily as possible.<\/p>\n When considering how to devise and implement a holistic design system<\/a> for your own onboarding experience, it\u2019s vital to take a step back and recognize any gaps or inconsistencies that exist. Consider not just how to fix those gaps and inconsistencies, but also why they might have arisen and how you can ensure they don\u2019t creep back in. Invest the time to establish a scalable, long-term onboarding strategy and modular, adaptable framework. After all, you need to give your team the best onboarding tools<\/a> if you want them to create a superior onboarding experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Great onboarding turns trial users into power users. Here’s how we used design thinking to improve our onboarding experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":21606,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[5],"tags":[206,205,18631,153,12706],"coauthors":[18562,510],"class_list":["post-21207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-and-design","tag-customer-onboarding","tag-onboarding","tag-onboarding-home","tag-product-design","tag-user-onboarding"],"yoast_head":"\nIn search of consistency<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Ch.-9-old-onboarding-Platform.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/ch.-9-old-onboarding-Messages.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/ch.-9-one-off-pattern.jpg\")
One team to oversee the responsibility<\/h2>\n
Building a design system for onboarding<\/h2>\n
\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Onboarding-Home.png\")
\nNew Onboarding Home provides a single place for all customers to start using Intercom<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nA framework for discovery<\/h2>\n
Helping users level up<\/h3>\n
\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/ch.-9.-Level-template.jpg\")
\nTemplate showing a level and the types of steps within it<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nCreating a familiar, cohesive experience for users<\/h3>\n
A cohesive set of guidelines and principles<\/h3>\n
\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/ch.-9.-Step-template.jpg\")
\nStep 1 template<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nBetter alignment = better onboarding<\/h2>\n