Product Thinking, Information Architecture, Interaction, UX/UI design, Prototyping & testing
10 weeks
1 Designer, Product manager, 1 Engineer manager, 2 Engineers.
Shortcut is a project management platform that allows users to plan, collaborate, build and measure the success of their projects.
When a new user joins Shortcut they have to understand how to use the platform and quickly evaluate whether it is a good fit for their team.
Despite having an onboarding checklist to set
users up for success, we were seeing an initial drop off with only 10% adopting our product after the free trial period.
We hypothesized that this drop off was due to confusion about our data hierarchy and users’ lack of ability to quickly evaluate the following questions:
- Can I convince my team to use this platform?
- Can I transfer the data from my existing project management tool into this new platform?
- Does Shortcut have the features that are essential to my team’s workflow?
As with any design process and to validate our hypotheses, we conducted user interviews to understand what they thought of the current onboarding journey at Shortcut. From this, we learned that some of our users were overwhelmed by our data hierarchy and struggled with the initial setup.
We learned that getting started can mean different things for different users depending on the size of their company, their role and where they are in their adoption journey. Therefore, for this new feature to be successful, we needed to build a solution that could be customized to fit different users’ needs and goals when entering Shortcut.
To address these issues and drive adoption, we decided to create a new “Personalized Quickstart Guide” for all new users entering Shortcut. We wanted the Quickstart Guide to help new users set up their organization, onboard their team and move their data from their old product management tool.
We also wanted to:
- Improve the conversion rate of trial starts to PQLs by at least 5%
- Improve the adoption rate of Shortcut amongst new organizations
- Help users quickly learn how to use Shortcut
- Create a flexible framework (internally) that can allow for further customization for new users in the future
After initial brainstorming, sketching and conducting comparative research, I started to flesh out different concepts to evaluate what experience would work best for the users as they are trying to accomplish their “Job to be done” when getting started.
After analyzing the best in class examples and considering our user’s needs, we defined the following best practices for our “Quickstart Guide”:
- New dedicated page
- Progress bar
- Expand/collapse menu
- Checkmark to show completed tasks
- Image related for context
- “Do more” for secondary tasks
After defining best practices for the “Quickstart Guide”, I started to explore every design detail in terms of design behaviour, interactions and animations to better communicate design requirements to engineers.
As the team was getting closer to ship the new Quickstart checklist, we wanted to understand if it was clear to the users how to navigate the product to complete a checklist item.
We also wanted to understand wether we should use a CTA for every task (that will link the user directly to the specific task) or if having an animated gif would be enough to show users where to go to complete the task.
Overall, feedback from the users was really positive. They thought that the flow was intuitive and the gif helped them to understand where to go to complete the tasks.
The new Quickstart guide is a feature that is tailored to the user’s role and needs as they are entering Shortcut. With the Quickstart guide, users can now complete a checklist that will help them not only get familiar with the product and the main features, but also set them and their team up for success.
