IBM Smart Software Onboarding

IBM Smart Software

Onboarding

PROBLEM

How might we tailor the onboarding experience of enterprise software for a prospective user by learning more about them and intervening as required?

SOLUTION

A personalized onboarding experience starting with a redesign of the product website that learns about the potential user's needs, leading into a quick setup process and a short, tailored tutorial to capture the user's interest.

ROLES

Problem Derivation

Brainstormed collaboratively with 4 other teammates to narrow down the scope of IBM's challenge following IBM's design thinking methodology and derived a core problem with onboarding experiences

User Research

Conducted team interviews with 5 project managers to understand what they looked for in software tools that could help their teams' productivity

Wireframing + Prototyping

Sketched wireframes with pencil & sticky notes, created hi-fi version of app design on Figma, and prototyped interactions using Keynote

CONTEXT

As part of the MDEI's summer capstone project, 4 other classmates and I had the opportunity to work with a design team at IBM. Their challenge to us was to explore the onboarding experience with enterprise software in the cognitive era.

In other words, how could we make the onboarding of enterprise software smarter and easier for prospective users?

OUR PROSPECTIVE USERS

We identified our prospective users as project managers because we decided to focus on a genre of enterprise software that the five of us classmates were familiar with: project management tools.

We interviewed 15 project managers, and to sum up their problems with trying new software, one of the PMs explained: "To demo and onboard your team is like dating and marrying someone: a product demo is like a honeymoon period. Buying the product is when the honeymoon ends."

Prospective users want to be able to try the tool and see if there's value in the tool upfront to understand if they want to commit to purchasing a software.

IDENTIFYING USER NEEDS

Clustering all of the testimonials provided by the interviews, we came up with a list of needs and problems that the project managers faced when dealing with new software. Among the list, we decided to focus on the following points to narrow our scope down:

Trust Your Gut: Users need a way to understand how a tool can help them so they can progress
Ease of Use + Complexity: Users need a simple and straightforward interface to allow users to realize the ability to help the user at its full potential. The interface also needs to be flexible to allow for a level of customization / tailoring.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN

We looked at onboarding experiences from existing enterprise software and identified 4 general problems:

Unnecessary data required: why ask for so much information upfront when we should be pushing the user to trial?
Empty content: there is no visual to what an ideal use of the tool could be, which can help show the tool's value
No flexibility: linear onboarding processes that don't let users go back or skip steps are seen as roadblocks to trial
Long registration: why put the user through so many steps just to register for a trial?

THE ONBOARDING PROCESS

To better understand what project managers went through with onboarding, we looked to IBM and other resources to break down the actions and behaviours involved.

Because the project managers' pain points focused around the Discovery and Try phases, we focused on improving those areas.

PERSONA

Lizzy is a chief operating officer in a fortune 500 company. She is looking for an enterprise business application, but is overwhelmed with all the apps in the market.

She is busy and has no time to explore for the right app; she needs to see the value now.
She is wondering how she might find an app that will be accepted by her team as well as end users in the entire organization.

SOLUTION: A PERSONALIZED ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE

The overall onboarding experience consisted of 3 parts:

The research (Discover) part, focusing on the product's website and tailoring it to the user's needs
The transition part, setting the user up on a trial of the product as seamless as possible
The tutorial (Try) part, teaching the user tasks s/he wants to know how to do with the tool

To clearly illustrate our experience, we used IBM's communications tool IBM Connections as an example.

LO-FI VERSIONS

One of the toughest challenges of this project was working collaboratively with a team of only designers, or specifically, to be inclusive of everyone's input while ensuring the end result was still of high quality. Our team used brainwriting techniques to merge the best of our five designs and create a set of hybrid lo-fi wireframes (depicted above) to cover the 3 parts of the experience.

Product page (Discover / Research): The design was intended to be a flexible webpage with content prepared and compiled in realtime to cater to the user's keyword searches that led to the product page. Key features are outlined upfront and are then followed by a call-to-action to try a demo. A quick registration via a LinkedIn plugin would bring them straight to the Welcome Screen in IBM Connections.
Welcome Screen, part 1 (Transition): This screen reiterated the key features that the user was interested in to reinforce that the onboarding and demo would be personalized to the user's experience.
Welcome Screen, part 2: This screen ensured the user was made aware of how long the onboarding would take, outlining the number of tasks the user would go through to complete the onboarding and what kind of tasks they would be to maintain interest in the tool.
Onboarding Overlay on Product (Try / Tutorial): The tasks would be done within IBM Connections, with the onboarding experience overlaid on top of the existing tool and a step-by-step process to guide the user through acting out the relevant task.

MID-FI / HI-FI VERSION

Feedback from IBM on the lo-fi version primarily focused on ensuring this experience was as seamless as possible. We looked to a bit of gamification for inspiration on how to visualize satisfaction in completing tasks. They also suggested choosing simple tasks to better illustrate how easy our proposed experience was for prospective users to grasp a tool.

As a result, it was important to ensure interactions were properly illustrated to provide a favourable experience. As the final deliverable for the project was presentation-based, we decided to use Keynote to provide the appropriate visual experience for our prototype.

Below is a 15-step flow of the overall mid-fi / hi-fi experience presented with our persona Lizzy successfully entering a trial of IBM Connections.

DISCOVER / RESEARCH

TRANSITION

STEP 1

Google Search

Lizzy is searching for a tool using keywords that describe what she is looking for.

STEP 2

Product Page

Upon landing on the IBM Connections webpage, the site creates a custom layout with details tailored to her via her search history.

STEP 3

Quick Registration

Relating to the details on the webpage, she can easily register for a trial using her LinkedIn details with a quick authorization process.

On the back end, the LinkedIn authorization allows IBM Connections to scrape her profile for details to customize the onboarding.

TRY / TUTORIAL

STEP 4

Welcome Screen

Lizzy is immediately redirected to IBM Connections' welcome screen, introducing her to a 3-step onboarding process.

STEP 5

Fictional Team

Lizzy is introduced to a fictional team comprised of teammates scraped from her LinkedIn profile to mimic her work environment for the demo.

STEP 6

Smart Configuration

Lizzy is then asked to verify the information on her profile, which was populated based on scraping her LinkedIn profile.

STEP 7

Mock Environment

After verifying the profile, Lizzy is brought to IBM Connections' main home page to start her demo, again with info scraped from LinkedIn.

STEP 8

Short Task Tutorial

Lizzy is introduced to her first task and is notified the demo will be quick, as it only consists of two tasks.

STEP 10

Scenario-based Task

A fictional teammate (based on her LinkedIn connections) presents Lizzy with a scenario that would drive the need to complete the demoed task.

STEP 11

Tooltip-oriented

Through a series of tooltips, Lizzy is then guided through the tool on how she would complete the task, simply requiring her to click through them.

STEP 12

Quick Completion

With a couple quick clicks, Lizzy is able to already complete her first of two tasks. She is halfway through her demo of relevant tasks.

STEP 13

End of Proposed Tasks

Lizzy completes the two tasks proposed to her smartly by the software based on her search history.

STEP 14

Chatbot Q&A

Lizzy is asked by a chatbot if she was satisfied with the demo. If she is not, the chatbot presents answer selections to pinpoint any other tasks Lizzy can complete to drive value.

STEP 15

30-Day Trial with Team

Upon being satisfied with the demo, Lizzy completes the demo and has a chance to try the tool out with a 30-day trial and to also onboard the rest of her team in a similar fashion.

FEEDBACK FOR FUTURE ITERATIONS

Due to time restrictions, testing was limited, which would have provided more opportunities to improve the UX and UI. As a result, the project was primarily focused on the exploration process, concluding at simply delivering a conceptual solution. With more time, proper testing would have been carried out with an interactable prototype to ensure the experience was satisfactory.