Onboarding Flow
UI Design for Improved User Setup and First-Time Experience
The Challenge
The original onboarding flow was tightly integrated with Office 365 sign-up. While this reduced initial friction, it created two key problems.
First, critical user and company details were often missing, forcing users to manually configure settings later. This delayed meaningful use of the product and increased setup friction after account creation.
Second, the flow provided no insight into acquisition channels or user intent. From a marketing and product perspective, this meant limited visibility into how customers were discovering the product or what they hoped to achieve, making it harder to optimise onboarding and growth strategies.
We needed to redesign onboarding to capture more meaningful information upfront without increasing drop-off and ensure users reached value faster once inside the product.
The Approach
I began by reviewing the existing onboarding journey to identify where users were deferring configuration or abandoning setup. I also looked at onboarding patterns from other work management tools, including Monday.com and Notion, to understand how they balanced data collection with perceived simplicity.
Rather than simply adding more fields, I restructured the flow around three goals:
Capture essential marketing and attribution data early
Collect the minimum viable configuration needed for a functional workspace
Create immediate perceived value upon first login
To support this, I built a lightweight onboarding component set derived from the core design system. While it remained consistent with the product UI, I introduced tailored components to signal that this was a guided setup experience rather than a standard in-app interaction.
A key decision was to pre-populate the workspace with sample projects and tasks based on user responses. This reduced the blank canvas effect and allowed users to immediately understand how the tool could fit their workflow.
The Outcome
The redesigned onboarding flow introduced clear step segmentation and progress indicators to reduce ambiguity around how long setup would take. Each stage was structured around a clear purpose, marketing context, organisational setup, user details and personalisation, ensuring that data collection felt logical rather than arbitrary.
To reinforce clarity, I incorporated contextual product previews throughout the flow. These connected user inputs directly to visible product features, helping users understand the relevance of each question.
Once inside the product, I introduced optional tutorial modals to guide first-time users through key areas. These could be dismissed at any time, giving users autonomy while still supporting those who needed structure.
The result was an intentional onboarding journey that aligned marketing insight with product activation, reduced deferred setup tasks and created a stronger sense of immediate value upon first use.
