FORMSTACK — JANUARY 2023

Customer onboarding

A guided tour of the admin panel that aimed to assist new trial users in how to navigate the suite plan in order to generate product qualified leads for a SaaS company.

TL;TR

Curating a cohesive onboarding experience

Following the launch of a new plan in December 2022, Formstack’s Product Design team collaborated to design a site-wide onboarding experience to support new trialers and drive product qualified leads (PQL). Guides for each product space were developed, launched, and tracked in Pendo.

As the co-designer for the admin panel, I worked closely with the Billing team’s Product Designer to create copy and design animated graphics for the onboarding guides.

MY ROLE

Co-Designer

TEAM

Product Designers

Product Marketing Manager

Product Manager

TOOLS

Figma

Pendo

Jira

Slack

TIMELINE

2 sprints = 4 weeks

New trialers are carefully guided through each page of their admin panel, with a focus on highlighting key features that will enhance their trial experience and inspire them to upgrade to a paid account.

THE SETUP

Backstory and plan benefits

Formstack started with a single application, Forms, and through acquisitions, added several apps to their portfolio, including Documents, Sign, Forms for Salesforce, and Copilot.

The company successfully launched a new plan to support its business vision of a unified platform. As a result, customers could now easily navigate through all the applications.

The new Suite plan bundles all of Formstack’s apps into a single plan.

THE PROBLEM

Unifying onboarding

Each application featured guides that introduced customers to the product features and capabilities. However, the lack of cohesion across the apps, text-heavy content, and conflicting call to actions left new customers with:

A disjointed experience.
Confusion about product offerings.
General lack of understanding that resulted in an increase in support queries.

“The highlighted content was not relevant to my experience and didn’t help me understand the product.”

- New trial customer

THE SOLUTION

A tailored journey

After reviewing user behavior and speaking with recent suite customers, we determined that a more personalized onboarding experience was necessary. Developing a unified journey would offer new customers:

A clear and flexible path to boost engagement.
Streamlined content to minimize confusion.
Seamlessly connected information with support materials to reduce the number of support requests.

We created a journey map of a new customer to include more delightful touch points and address frustrations.

my partnership

Getting to know the Admin Panel

I partnered with my design counterpart on the billing team to create the guides for the admin panel.

Before designing, we agreed which areas we wanted to highlight on the panel that would help trialers and customers better familiarize themselves with the product resulting in them becoming product qualified leads (PQLs).

To incentivize new trialers to become PQLs, the Product team identified different actions that would support users throughout their trial and once they become paying customers.

Content should be short, fun, and useful.

Enhancing this process would yield a number of benefits, including increased engagement and adoption, improved comprehension, and higher retention rates.

As a Product Design team, we leveraged insights from our individual research efforts and established a set of design principles to guide us in creating these guides before transitioning to our designated product areas.

Our primary objective was to maintain consistency in visual design, copywriting, and tone across products.

We introduced checklists and reminders to help customers locate information in case they choose to dismiss the guide.

Copy and animated graphics

I handled the creation of copy and visuals, while my partner integrated them into Pendo.

Upon crafting an initial draft of the copy, I collaborated with members of the Support team to gather their input and pinpoint any additional information that could prove valuable to highlight.

One specific point they raised was the importance of highlighting the account ID, as it could significantly expedite the process of identifying customer accounts.

“Highlighting the account ID could significantly expedite the process of identifying customer accounts.”

- Support team member

THE PIVOTS

Keep it brief

After reviewing the content with our Product Marketing Manager, she provided us with a few suggestions based on current user behaviors, and we made a few pivots to the design, including:

Limiting the amount of gifs to one per page
Reducing the amount of text
Staying away from colloquialisms

"Say cheese" and "Tell us more, tell us more!" are American colloquial expressions that might not be familiar to all customers. We revised the titles to ensure clarity.

Now

Ensure a seamless flow across all product applications.
Customers have access to a flexible, guided walkthrough of the admin panel, which they can revisit whenever they require a refresher.

We plan to iterate on the highlighted information based on user behavior, feedback, and common asked questions.
We intend to provide links to additional support materials to further assist customers.

Following the completion of their admin panel walkthrough, new customers are encouraged to explore our product applications.

THE TAKEAWAYS

Pendo performance

After the guide's launch, we saw impressive results:

Clickthrough rates for the admin panel skyrocketed from 11% to 47%.
32% conversion rate from new trial users to paid customers.
63% of paid customers successfully completed at least one of the five key actions: viewing and updating their profile, enabling two-factor authentication, adding an organizational logo, inviting users, or upgrading their plan.

As the team continues to develop new features for non-admin users, the guide performance will continue to be monitored to identify opportunities for enhancing our onboarding offerings, ultimately delivering even more valuable experiences to our customers.