User Onboarding Experience

Abstract

This thesis has explored the concept of user onboarding, which is the process of converting first-time visitors into long-term users by introducing them to a new product or service. The aim of this study was to investigate how an improved onboarding experience, based on extensive user research, can increase users’ motivation to visit a platform more frequently, using the HR-company Benify as a case study. To accomplish this, a design process was formulated based on the Human-Centered Design, Goal-Directed Design, and Participatory Design frameworks, which extensively integrated quantitative and qualitative research methods to increase research validity. To address the problem statement and research questions, an onboarding experience was designed based on a number of principles from established onboarding strategies, as well as behavior theories on human motivation, and was later experimentally tested through an A/B test. The results from the A/B testing showed no statistically significant difference between the company’s current onboarding design and the new onboarding design variation, although some results suggested that the latter variation was slightly superior to the company’s current design variation. The assessment of the results was that both the execution of the A/B test and the qualitative research methods experienced several flaws that need to be improved for future iterations, and that the root cause of infrequent visits to the platform may not be related to the onboarding experience for this specific instance. Conducting more extensive qualitative user research to better establish the users key activation moments and main challenges, as well as redesigning the A/B testing to improve the measure of the dependent variables, could potentially improve the outcome of the work.