Box
Personalized onboarding experience
At the time, Box had a very limited onboarding experience for our customers. Users struggled to understand the value that Box provides and thus resulting in a less-than-ideal retention rate for early users. As company leadership recognized this – they were able to dedicate more resources to the team. This allowed the team to refocus and rethink the overarching strategy. We were able to conduct discovery calls with existing clients, collaborate with cross-functional partners (data science, product marketing managers, customer success), and build an experimentation model that focused on a more personalized onboarding experience
As the design lead for the onboarding experience, I was able to work closely with product management to define our strategy to create a multi-quarter roadmap that focuses on a more curated experience for our customers.
The team was tasked with increasing engagement within core features of Box. Our team worked on the first time onboarding experience and communicating the user being able to have their entire content lifecycle (creating, collaborating, storing) all within Box.
With the size of this project, the team focused on different success metrics based on the created experience. However ultimately, the team was looking to see an increase in engagement on our core features and see an increase in 8-week retention.
The first-time onboarding experience is a massive scale project that has high expectations from our internal stakeholders. Because of this, our team had to go with a phased approach to our work. This resulted in us focusing on small aspects of the larger vision every couple sprints. Our goal was to build a holistic experience, but had to manage expectations and break the experience down in little pieces while making sure the experience was connected together.
We consider our users the “end users”. To put it simple – our users can be anyone. When a company purchases Box, they need to release the product to their organization. Those individuals in the organization can be anybody from any industry. Because of this, the team had to conduct user research to find patterns and commonalities across the end-users to develop a relevant first time experience.
As a team, one of the first tasks the team conducted was to document the scale of our existing onboarding experience. At the time, there wasn’t clear documentation on the flow of the experience. This caused challenges as it was difficult to communicate what our customers actually experienced. To mitigate the challenges, we spent time working with product marketing to create an interactive experience for anyone and everyone to see the existing experience. As we documented the work, we were able to pinpoint major pain points as well as generate new discussions and ideas that got integrated into our roadmap. We were able to document every step in the onboarding process, including other platforms such as our mobile app and our desktop app.
At this stage in the project, our team was pretty unfamiliar with the challenges and use cases of adoption and onboarding. In the past, we mostly worked with customer success and looked at the quantitative data – however we wanted to conduct more generative research to get better insight from a human level. To do this, the team drafted a research strategy and used usertesting.com as our main source for research. We were able to talk to over 30 customers that consisted of 1-hour zoom calls discussing how the user got started with Box and how they use the product
+ To understand and articulate Box’s end users’ persona (motivations, barriers, use cases) and user journey.
+ To uncover the root causes of what differentiates a power user from an unengaged user.
+ To build user empathy among internal stakeholders. The team spent roughly around 1 month to conduct the discovery calls and synthesize them to find 3 key themes around the challenges for our customers.
In a crowded and competitive market, the overarching themes we found circled around the inconsistent methods of communications and the general perception of Box.
+ Our customers are unfamiliar with Box and would only learn about the product when their company mandates them to use it.
+ Our customers do not get training when using Box. Typically they create an account and are expected to understand how to use the product.
+ Customers are unaware of relevant features existing in Box.
communication
+ There isn’t anything that Box offers that is better than other platforms.
At the conclusion of our research we realized a few key problem areas we felt our team could tackle. For the most part, our customers didn’t understand the value that Box provides for them. Through our insights, there wasn’t a strong understanding of our core features and how Box can impact their team’s work. Our hypothesis to this problem was to see if we can create a more personalized and communicative onboarding experience as they enter the product.
Problem #1: Lack of Awareness in Core Box Functionality
One of the most glaring challenges we found almost immediately is that a majority of the customers we spoke with had no idea what Box could actually do. They had minimal training with the product and only saw Box as a place to store their files at the end of their projects. They would create workflows or collaborate with other software which many found as a less than ideal experience. Because of their limited understanding of the product, many users would use Box’s bare minimum functions such as adding files and sharing.
Problem #2: What makes Box Different?
One of the most common questions our customers ask us is What makes Box Different? Many use Box because their organization purchased the product and required everyone to start using it. However, many customers we spoke with just don’t see the difference between Box and the other competitors.
At the last leg of our research – the team felt like we were in a place to develop a more holistic strategy to communicate with internal stakeholders. In this process, we wanted to include the perspective of all team members including data analysts and the engineering team. Because of our collaborative mindset, the team would hold quarterly workshops to communicate new ideas and our overall vision. We would hold activities such as crazy 8 and solutions sketching with the entire team and collaborate together on realistic initiatives that could fit into our roadmap.
At the last leg of our research – the team felt like we were in a place to develop a more holistic strategy to communicate with internal stakeholders. In this process, we wanted to include the perspective of all team members including data analysts and the engineering team. Because of our collaborative mindset, the team would hold quarterly workshops to communicate new ideas and our overall vision. We would hold activities such as crazy 8 and solutions sketching with the entire team and collaborate together on realistic initiatives that could fit into our roadmap.
After the research concluded and we completed our workshops with various stakeholders, the team felt compelled enough to work on early concepts of what our experience could look like. We wanted to focus on 3 core areas – the initial setup experience, the first time experience, and the continuous onboarding experience. The initial direction of the experience was to see how we can incorporate a more personal touch to our onboarding.
One of the early hypotheses the team had was the idea of creating a more linear experience for a user as they get onboarded to Box.
When the user completes the initial setup experience, the user will be taken to the product for the first time. The team looked at various opportunities to enhance their first time experience including the use of tooltips and checklists.
As the user continues to use Box, the team looked at new opportunities to get users to stay engaged with more advanced functionality. This led to new opportunities and think about net-new experiences.
Our team’s experiences potentially introduced large changes to the user’s mental model. Because of this, it was vital to the team’s success to test our proposed user flows while also getting consistent feedback from internal stakeholders. Every sprint and cycle we went through, we tested our experiences through usertesting.com. This allowed us to gather very quick feedback that resulted in testing our designs with over 70 users. This allowed us to validate new flows, while eliminating experiences that don’t resonate with our customers as much.
When a user first creates an account with Box, they are taken to our setup experience. This experience gives the user more clarity on what Box is while allowing us to curate a more custom onboarding experience for the user.
When the user clicks on “Continue” they are taken to a new experience where we ask the user how they would like to use Box. The reasoning behind this experience is we found that a majority of our users have a specific reason to use Box, whether it’s to store files or share, we wanted to understand their use cases and curate a more custom onboarding experience for them. This also gives earlier communications to our users that they can create and collaborate in Box as well.
With the usage experience being the core experience of the user’s onboarding journey, the team mapped out every single communication we present to the user and their onboarding experiences that they will get based on what they select. As the user continues to use Box, the team will use our Content Intelligence technology to better understand how user’s use Box and will also be used as a method to communicate to user’s.
The user would only see this experience if they select “Create” in the previous screen. One of the metrics our team was looking to increase was the user creating new files in Box. Because of this, our team had a hypothesis that users had different workflows based on the software they used to create files before they used Box. With our research, we had a strong understanding of the user flows file types – we created an experience to communicate that they can create within Box and we’ll enhance our experience based on what they select.
This experience is included in the setup flow because we found that Drive could be a major factor in a user’s retention. When a user downloads and uses Drive, there would be a significant increase in Box’s retention than users who didn’t use Drive.
Once the user completes the setup experience, they will be given various messages based on their responses in the in app onboarding experience.
This experience is tied to the File Type Creation experience in the setup flow. Depending on what they choose, the user will see different calls to actions. The example below is for Microsoft users. With Box integrations, the user can create Microsoft documents within Box. The team hypothesizes that creating a banner that will call out creation will encourage users to create/add content to their account.
Everything our team has worked on up to this point has been the day 1 onboarding experience. However, we know that onboarding is experienced throughout the entire journey a user goes through. After the user completes their initial setup experience, we wanted to find unique ways to communicate additional functionality to our users as they use the product. With content intelligence, we were able to track how users use Box, and recommend additional functions that we believe will help them with their workflow. Not everyone will receive the same messages – there are a set of conditions a user has to meet before they are eligible to receive a message. Example: We track which files the users frequently visits and recommends the user to add these files to their favorites for better organization. This not only gives the user easier access to their files, but highlights one of Box’s core features in Collections.
Overall the experiments we’ve conducted have been such a valuable experience. These projects made the entire team think more holistically and be more strategic with our timing in messages and other onboarding opportunities.The team is building the onboarding in a phased approach meaning the team is actively working on the majority of the experience. However, we are able to do soft releases with TAV <100K users so we are able to experiment with our design decisions. Overall, what we've seen so far in the data has given the team much optimism.