Case Study

Onboarding Experience

Turning free signups into engaged users with meaningful first steps and magical automation

Redesigned Fluxx Grantmaker dashboard: refreshed typography, spacing, color, and information hierarchy
Product
Grantseeker
Role
Product Designer
Impact
  • Achieved profitability in 6 months
  • 40% Increase in onboarding completions

Overview

Grantseeker is a SaaS productivity tool for nonprofits, which helps them track the grants they've received, communicate with funders, and search for new funding opportunities. As a product designer on the Grantseeker team, I helped to design a new onboarding flow that would get new users working with real data in less than a minute.

Problems

  • New signups struggled to quickly comprehend the value of the Grantseeker platform
  • Few users completed existing onboarding
Initial onboarding flow
BEFORE: Initial onboarding flow with value propositions

Goals

  • Delight new signups with a helpful walkthrough
  • Help users get “real data” into the system with minimal friction
  • Turn casual signups into paying customers in less than 14 days

Background

Grantseeker's initial open beta was free-to-use for all initial signups. When I joined the team, a pivot to freemium was underway, and the key to turning casual users into paying subscribers was a quick, effective onboarding flow.

Process

The existing onboarding flow for free beta signups consisted of several static slides with value propositions about functionality, with no contextual help once users landed inside the app. Only about 35% of new signups got through the onboarding slides, and even fewer went on to create meaningful usage in the app afterwards.

In order to overhaul the onboarding experience, my research started with identifying the "real" data that grantees cared about most, and innovating ways to get it precisely modeled in the app as quickly as possible.

I collaborated with Grantseeker’s engineers to identify the types of record creation that correlated most highly with regular visits, and began to sketch friendly ways to nudge new users towards getting these records set up.

The re-factored onboarding flow

Our biggest innovation in getting users onboarded quickly came from leveraging public data. Utilizing government public-records APIs, we were able to architect a flow that would get a user up and running with their first "real" data in less than a minute, borrowing from quick-start social media patterns like "find your friends" or "who to follow". It worked like this:

  1. A user provides the name of their organization at signup
  2. A pre-populated search lets the user select their org from a list
  3. An API call pulls in all the funders that have previously given to that org, according to government records.
  4. The user creates records for all of their funders in a single click

The new user signup flow was cut from 5 informational “slides” to 2 simple interactive steps: An optional intro video, and an API-powered search to confirm their organization details.

Onboarding modal: public data found
Onboarding modal: public data found!

Once users land on the app’s dashboard, a simple 3-step checklist tracks their progress through initial setup. To shepherd new users through the flow, I designed a new icon library, extending our UI icons with brand colors and transparency effects. Friendly, legible, and on-brand.

Homepage showing onboarding checklist
Grantseeker "blank slate" homepage with onboarding checklist
Onboarding task icons
Final onboarding task icons

After initial onboarding, users are fed a drip campaign of super-lightweight "tips", to nudge them into socializing the app with their coworkers and further integrate Grantseeker's tools with their day-to-day work.

Onboarding tips example
Onboarding tips example

Solution

The redesigned onboarding resulted in:

  • A massive 40% increase in onboarding completions
  • Profitability for the platform within 6 months of launching paid tiers

Further Considerations

The new onboarding flow is highly effective at getting new users set up quickly, but the built-in logic is rather simplistic. If I had more time and resources on the project, I would have loved to further investigate branching flows for different types of users, prospect scoring, and smarter targeting logic for nudges.