Design a new
onboarding experience
My Role at Lobster Ink, 2018-2020
Lobster Ink is a global-leading B2B e-learning platform focusing on the hospitality industry. It has clients in 140 different countries. The platform serves more than 1 million users globally. We have two types of user profiles: managers and learners.
I focused on the manager user profile.
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When I first joined the company in 2018, Lobster Ink just released its MVP. It was a great opportunity for me to have a strategic impact on the product.
During 2018 - 2020, I've led multiple research and design projects on various topics, including:
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Design a new onboarding experience
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Improve the enterprise rollout process (service design)
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Redesign the assigning contents experience
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Redesign the reporting experience
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Usability tests on various new or improved features: search for learners, learner page, etc.
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Project Summary & Achievements
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This case study zooms in to the Design a new onboarding experience project. It was seen as an example of Human-Centered Design and the whole team was very proud of it.
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Team:
Netherlands (core team): UI Designer, Dev team, Product Owner, Product Manager and me
South Africa: Implementation Specialist
US: Customer Success Manager
Methods:
Interview
Persona Development
Workshop Facilitation
Prototyping
Usability Test
Achievements:
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Developed 2 persona: an on-property trainer and a department manager, after remotely interviewing 7 users from different hotel brands in US, Europe and South East Asia.
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Facilitated 1 ideation workshop with a global distributed team.
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Conducted 6 usability tests on the newly designed onboarding process.
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Aligned with the Product Owner and the Dev team on the development progress.
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The Challenge
Since the MVP release, the platform has seen some major issues due to its cumbersomeness: ​
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Extra implementation effort: Implementation specialists often acted on behalf of the clients because the platform was difficult to use as a self-service tool.​
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Extra communication effort: Lobster Ink and clients' headquarters had to often hold tutorial webinars and Q&A sessions for on-property managers.​
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Conversion challenge: Difficult to convert potential clients after sales demo or trial.​
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Engagement challenge: According to weekly calls with clients' Learning and Development (L&D) departments and our Support team, users were disengaged, confused and frustrated on the platform.
No previous user research was done. Therefore, the team wanted to learn how people used the platform in the real world and how we could improve the platform based on people's need.
Research
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Interview
My first priority was to understand who our users were, their goals and behaviors, and how the product was currently used in their own context.
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I partnered with the Implementation team, the Customer Success Management team and Product Owner to recruit participants for interviews. In total 7 users were interviewed. They were in different managerial roles, hotel chains and countries.
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Persona Development
I then developed two types of persona . See below.
Persona: Madison Garcia
Persona: Anong Bunnag
Affinity Mapping
Next , I built an affinity map to organize the interview insights. Seven themes emerged.
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Hospitality industry structure. Major differences were found between SMEs vs. enterprises, between above-property vs. on-property managers, and between managed vs. franchised hotels.
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Email usage in Asian countries. Most learners in South East Asia don't use/have emails. They use communication apps (e.g. Line, Whatsapp, etc) for work.
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Translation. It concerns the platform, the learning contents and the exercises.
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First-time experience. Managers didn't have much knowledge of how the platform works. No tutorials or Q&A sections available on the platform.
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Team tracking. This is a main task of a (training) manager. It covers multiple topics such as tracking progress, downloading report, benchmarking, etc.
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Learner management. This is a main task of a training manager (or admin). In the hospitality industry, the yearly turnover rate can reach 70%, which makes an admin's work extremely challenging.
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Assignment management. This is a main task of a training manager (or admin). He/she needs to make sure the right learning assignments were assigned to the right learners.
The team was quite surprised by some discoveries, especially those about translation and culture. I quickly gained some buy-in from the team about the value of user research.
Taking into account of those research insights, the business impact, the company strategy and the tech limitations, our team decided to focus on improving the first-time experience first because it would have an overarching impact on other elements on the platform.
Workshop Facilitation
At this stage, the team was excited about what we have learned. I believed that an ideation workshop would be a great way to get the team more involved and to help them get a feeling of a Human-Centered Design process.
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I organized an ideation workshop to design manager onboarding experience. I invited designers, Product Manager, Product Owner, Customer Success Manager and Implementation Specialists. The team was globally distributed, which was a big challenge for me to facilitate.
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I then decided to go hybrid: I held the session online in Amsterdam. The local team members were in a workshop setting so they could draw their ideas and share them. Other team members used Google Sheet to write down their ideas and also share them. This way, the whole team kept realtime communication and the visual presentations were not lost.
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Some of the workshop materials I used are shown below.
Workshop example 1
Workshop example 2
Workshop example 3
Workshop example 4
Below are some of the drawings (local) and idea descriptions (remote) from the participants.
From participant 1
From participant 2
From participant 3
From participant 4
At the end of the workshop, 3 most voted ideas were taken further to the prototyping phase.
Prototype
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Iteration 1
I quickly built three different onboarding concepts based on the ideas generated from the workshop. However, after a few tech reviews with the Dev team and Product Owner, it was clear that the concepts couldn't be implemented without huge development effort. The main constrain was that the platform couldn't be personalized based on the user's input during the onboarding process.
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Below you can see some of the concepts.
Iteration 2
The Product Owner proposed that instead of a full onboarding process, the Dev team could build a landing page as a start. The question then became: How do we design a landing page?
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So I went back to my previous interview insights and identified a simplified manager's goal-oriented work flow on the platform. This work flow helped me decide on the essential elements on the landing page, which guided the Designer to create the prototype.
A simplified managers' goal-oriented work flow
Concept design by me. UI design and prototyping by Alex Pierce.
Usability Test
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I then conducted the usability test with 6 internal colleagues.
Internal colleagues were chosen because recruiting participants from our clients could take too long, while our internal colleagues represented our persona to a certain extent.
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I invited the designer Alex to join the test sessions as an observer so he could get first-hand user feedback on his prototype.
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Below you can see parts of my report.
Test report example 1
Test report example 2