- User Flows
- Interaction
- UI
- Cross Functional
Lockstep was a series A startup working on solving the problem of disconnected accounting practices. Because accounting has two clear and distinct services - receivables and payments - Lockstep needed an on boarding system that could onboard users to a variety of products Lockstep was developing.
And some of these products weren’t even for Accountants.
The onboarding flow was largely driven by the technical requirements to onboard a user to the dashboard you see here. Simply stated, in order to build the data for this dashboard, we would need the user to grant us access to their email and to their accounting system.
I started the process by facilitating postup sessions using user flows created in figjam. This was chosen so that we could work in an asynchronous manner, allowing our dispersed team to all have the opportunity to contribute and to have full transparency for engineering and product leadership.
The results of these sessions would be turned into prototypes to show how a user would flow through the product and when requirements would be gathered in the onboarding experience.
While working the prototypes out, I worked to establish an OKR that the team could align on to measure the implementation of this work.
We would call this OKR the “critical path” and it stated that we would pull data in from the systems users were giving us access to in order to limit the amount of edits a user would need to make, thus limiting the steps a user would have to go through to complete onboarding. In addition to this, we would pair a step counter in the flow to help our users understand where they were in their onboarding flow. You can see this in action at left, a user selects Intuit as their SSO provider, and once the user authenticates with Intuit, Lockstep will pull their information in automatically, creating the feeling that onboarding is simple and easy.
This approach was tested and validated with users, but engineering had a hard time pulling the information from social logins. We opted to test this while we worked on other options. At the very least, we’d get valuable data and feedback. We learned that auto populating is crucial, and importantly – asking for too much information upfront resulted in major drop offs.
While we worked out implementation issues and user feedback, the product ecosystem was changing. We no longer had just the Lockstep Inbox dashboard to support, we would have other products for other types of users.
So I went back to wireframes and set about establishing a new OKR.
“We want to simplify the account creation process to reduce the amount of user drop offs and reduce the amount of engineering overhead in creating an account.”
The work started with a continuation of our minimal aesthetic.
The goal of this work was synthesizing our landscape research which included studying what major players like Google and Microsoft were doing for their on boarding, but also looking at analogous interaction patterns – primarily by studying what conversion focused companies like online merchants were doing with their checkout processes.
After working with engineering and stakeholders we were able to get agreement on a major shift in how we approached onboarding. We would no longer ask for personal or accounting system information upfront. Instead, that would move to individual app onboarding experience where needed. This also gave us a new opportunity. Because account creation was so simple, if a user were to drop off in app onboarding, we had the ability to contact that user for user interviews or for marketing efforts.
As we came to a decision on the best way to handle the SSO providers, I saw an additional opportunity. How might we sync our onboarding together with our Branding?
This new onboarding flow would remove all of the required systems integration to both satisfy our OKR goals, and to allow us to separate account creation from onboarding.
Once a user authenticates or provides an email, we simply need to verify their email and account creation is done.
Next we moved onboarding into the actual application that the user wanted to onboard into.
This gave us two new opportunities. We could now track user flows more granularly, and because their account with Lockstep is already created, we can now communicate with users to better understand their needs.
The implementation of this flow resulted in account conversions increasing from a paltry 2% to 90%. And while we did not have specific onboarding analytics due to the previous implementation, we are seeing full onboarding converting at roughly 70%. In fact, you can still see this in use for Lockstep’s Onboarding today.