LACRM Onboarding Experience

Tori Kayla.

Product Designer.

I’m a Product Designer based in Bermuda designing SaaS solutions that delight users and help them work smarter, not harder.

Enhancing the onboarding experience for new users

Project type

Product design project for onboarding experience

Contribution

Project management
High-fidelity mockups

outcome

Partial design shipped
Full design roll out 2024

My role

Product designer
Visual designer

Timeline

One month
(Aug 2022 - Sep 2022)

BACKGROUND

Less Annoying CRM is a simple, yet effective CRM for small business owners. Their focus is to provide users with a low-tech way to manage their contacts without all the extra and unnecessary features major CRM companies provide.

For this project, I was asked to reimagine the sign-up page and onboarding experience to enhance the experience for new users. While efficient, the current sign-up page is focused on getting the user signed up as quickly as possible. The new approach, based on user research, was to extend the sign up process to continue nurturing the relationship with the user and highlight how to get the utmost value out of our CRM.

MY ROLE

I serve the Less Annoying CRM team as the primary Product Designer. For this project, I was tasked with reviewing user research conducted by a third party company, as well as other in house metrics, to delight new customers signing up for our product. I worked closely with the CEO (Product Owner) to confirm my designs delivered the same, seamless process while adding small enhancements to create a more thoughtful user experience.

THE CHALLENGE

Stakeholders reviewed the health of Less Annoying CRM’s business and determined that long term users keep the company going. With this in mind, the question that came to the entire company was “how do we get more long term users”.

Through reviewing internal metrics and hiring a third party research company to dive into our customer’s experience, it was determined that potential long term customers would churn due to not realizing the full power of our CRM’s capabilities.

THE OPPORTUNITY

This challenge presented an opportunity to design a sign-up process that highlighted the primary ways in which they could customize their experience. The intention was to do this through showcased examples of what it would be like for themselves, or their team, to use the product.

RESEARCH

For this project, I did not oversee or handle user research. Instead, our company hired a third-party research company to deep dive into what is working with our users and where we could improve on a larger scale.

From their findings, I had these key takeaways that helped me navigate my design process for this project:

+ Users commit to LACRM after having an “aha moment”, specifically about being able to customize their pipelines and custom fields. This was a major insight to learn about as many users never customize their CRMs during their free trial and hence, never commit to a paid account. This drove my decision to highlight the customization capabilities early on in their sign up process.

+ LACRM has a “goldilocks effect” on users, meaning users love it because it’s not too complicated like larger companies, but too limited like smaller ones. Ultimately, users see us as “just right”.

+ The primary user on multi-user accounts tends to take on the role of “communications manager”, meaning their focus is on tracking communication between different users on the account and their shared contacts.

PAIN POINTS

With the above findings, I was able to do a deep dive into our current sign-up page to identify pain points that we could improve upon.

+ Pain point 1: Text-heavy As the final page before users commit to a free trial, the page overwhelms users with text that attempts to explain what they can expect as opposed to showing them visually what’s to come. The goal in my redesign is to rely on visuals to tell the story of what a user can expect in their free trial.

+ Pain point 2: Missed customization opportunity After this page, users are redirected into the app with no further steps. There’s a missed opportunity on this page/in this process to encourage them to take an extra moment to set up their workspace so it’s customized from the beginning rather than starting them off with default demo settings.

IDEATION

In deep diving into the sign-up page, I found that while it was efficient to have one form, a multi-step process could be a good option to prep and prime users for their customized experience.

I broke down the sign-up page into a wizard onboarding experience laid out as such:

+ Sign-up Form with form (First Name, Last Name, Email, Password)

+ Industry Selection (which customizes their pipelines and custom fields when selected)

+ Team/User Selection for how many users will be on the account

+ E-mail Marketing Opt-In for our biweekly newsletter

HIGH FIDELITY MOCKUPS (FIRST ATTEMPTS)

In my first attempt to design this sequence, I created the below pages for the onboarding flow. These mockups combined literal designs from within the app and mockup-style graphics to further highlight the product’s value. While elements of these designs worked, they were visually disjointed. During my second round of iteration, I focused on having a cohesive approach to the designs.

THE FINAL RESULT

The final result was an onboarding experience that used graphics to further convey the value the customer is about to receive. The overall feel for the sequence is a sleek, cohesive one that tells the story of how the user will interact with the app. This onboarding experience also has enhanced opportunities to highlight the customized experience a user will receive.

NEXT STEPS

The proposed onboarding experience has not been implemented in its’ entirety. The goal is to have the full onboarding experience shipped in 2024.

The process to implement a portion of this design (the first page only) started with testing the new design against the former. This was done to confirm it did not have a negative impact on conversions.

After months of testing, the new sign-up page (start your free trial) had a comparable conversion rate (~ 1% higher), so it was shipped to all globally. You can view the live design here.

For Review and research

Once implemented, I would love to review analytics to see how this design impacts conversions from free trial to paid user and overall retention. To further refine this design, I’d focus on the below metrics:

+ Percentage of new users that select an industry. While still optional, I would like to track how many new users actually follow through with picking an industry with the new design.

+ Percentage of free trials that convert to paid accounts. My goal is to see if the new onboarding sequence increases conversions for our free trial.

+ Metrics on retention of users. Conversions are great, but I would also like to focus on how the retention of users going through this process is in comparison to the old sign-up page.