Improving user onboarding to provide a better poll creation experience
Sometimes we need to add friction to the user flow in order to provide them with a better experience.
About the app
Polly is a purpose-built app for Microsoft Teams and Slack to help capture instant feedback. Using Polly, you can create short fun polls and visualize the data so you can improve your workflows. You can either create polls from scratch or use any of the given templates.
Problem Statement
Initially, the user flow was as simple as:
1- Install the app in MS Teams.
2- Create a poll.
3- Wait for the results.
In my efforts to constantly improve the product I came across two interesting stats.
1- We were not able to classify users in order to provide them with personal experiences.
2- Users who used a template to create their first poll were more likely to keep using the app for a longer period of time.
My Role
I facilitated the planning & research and executed the design. First of all, we validated our findings with the user data we got from Amplitude, Chart Mogul, and the user sessions from Datadog.
I conceptualized the solution and created multiple prototypes to create a story out of it.
Ran the concepts with the design manager as well as other stakeholders. After a number of feedback sessions and user validation, I finalized the solution.
Goals
1- Provide users personalized onboarding experience.
2- Help users create their first poll.
The Process
I started out by mapping the current user flow. It was way too bland. Watching user recordings helped me understand some key user pain points. A major problem that I identified was, that users would sign in and they would land on a blank canvas and they had to figure out what to do next.
After several discussions with the product manager, and design manager I laid down a user flow to get started with. It looked something like this.
Got back to the product manager to help me identify the exact onboarding questions we wanted to ask users. The goal was to create a sweet balance between us identifying our users and not making it a long wizard. We decided to ask the following questions:
1- Who is going to use the app?
2- What are your goals?
Asking users “who is going to use the app” was important because we wanted to identify the exact persona upfront so that we could provide them with relevant experience. For example, if somebody bought the subscription for another team, they won’t be interested in exploring templates, etc. This also helped us branch questions. For example, if somebody bought the app for their team, we would ask them what their team size was. This would enable us to show them the relevant templates and other experiences.
Asking about goals was important because we wanted to populate relevant templates in front of the users, that they could relate with. Because, based on our findings, people who used templates were more likely to use the app over and over again. That’s why we plugged template usage right in the onboarding steps.
Based on user goals we would populate templates that were relevant to them only.
This not only helped us provide users with a personalized experience but also helped users get familiarised with the poll creation components.
This would help users send their first poll right from the onboarding. In case the user isn’t ready to shoot their poll at this point, they can just save it for later.
We made sure that we didn’t force users to follow our dictated path. Thus we allowed them to skip this template part. Even if they skipped the template, we tried to give them a fluid experience where they could begin creating polls from scratch or just use pre-made templates.
After the flow work was finalized I started working on the UI designs and the prototype. Once the prototype was done I ran it by the Design Manager. After a few design tweaks, I handed it over to the Product Manager to get his feedback too.
After that we created a test group of people who were not familiar with the product, to get a fresh perspective. Once that was done we ran this privately by some of our current customers too. After all these validations we shared it with the dev team to be implemented.
