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Onboarding for time tracking company admins

Description

QuickBooks Time is an external tool used by small businesses to track their employees' work hours. I redesigned the onboarding experience for these admins by creating a guided setup and highlighting time tracking features.

Role: Lead UX designer and researcher 

Problems with old onboarding

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Customer problems

  • Long list and looks complicated

    • How might we make time tracking seem easy

      • offering basic time tracking and advanced time tracking

  • don’t know what to set up

    • how might we personalize the user’s experience

      • by letting users pick what they want to setup

  • Just want to get started with playing with the tool

    • how might we show the benefit of time tracking upfront

      • show the benefit and UIs of the product

  • (TBD) why does QuickBooks Time not look the same as setup

    • limitations- not everything can be re-designed due to time limitations

      • how might we introduce QBT tool and set expectations

Re-designed onboarding

Benefits of new onboarding

Make time tracking setup easy
New onboarding.png

Customer problem

Setup looked longer than expected and seems complicated

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How we tackled this​

We reviewed our features usage data and divided our setup into basic and advanced versions. Users only see the basic version and if they are interested will select advanced features to explore next.​​

Establish confidence in setup
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Customer problem

Too much to setup before I can even try the product. Just want to get started and playing with the tool.

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How we tackled this

Users learn whether the setup is correct by trial and error. We want to reduce the work for users and establish moments that build confidence. One such moment is when the user can see a preview of what their team's timesheet will look like. 

Plus all the interviewees were in favor of a preview. ​

Let users personalize their setup
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Customer problem

The old setup didn't look relevant to my business's needs. The features I need are hard to find. 

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How we tackled this

Referring to the usage data we picked top 5-6 features that advanced setup users might need. This provides a way to customize setup and also helps users discover features that exist in the product.  

Process

Questions: What do existing users think about our setup? Where are they struggling?

  • Interviewed 10 users who went through the onboarding experience in the past 2 months

  • Review data metrics on how the setup is performing

  • Interview customer care experts who interact directly with our users

  • Review feature usage data to prioritize most used features to establish 70-30 rule: 70% users would need basic setup, 30% users would need advanced setup

Questions: What do users think about our new setup approach?

  • Multiple concept tests with current time tracking users

Design  decisions

(TBD) Setting expectations regarding the tool

(tbd) An ideal self-onboarding experience would provide guidance andShow how the system works- with no too much detail

Users shared they want to play with the tool - show by letting them try the app themselves and get preview of the tool and set expectations on what it would look like

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Information layout

Some of the settings are pretty content heavy and to support self-onboarding experience we want to balance out content needed to explain features and information hierarchy. We tested multiple ways of representing the same data.

For self-onboarding, interviewees preferred question format which seemed conversational like talking to a customer care representative. Users also preferred defaults selected for them, instead of making selections on their own.

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Setting expectations when linking out to QBT

Time tracking tool is an external tool that is slowly being integrated into QuickBooks Online. However, users do not understand our current technical limitations. On research we found, first time users were getting confused on why they were being linked to a new window with a completely different UI.

I referred to a lot of industry practices and really liked how Yelp sets the expectations for users when they are navigating to a restaurant's main website. We applied the same mental model here and tested during our concept testing and users were able to differentiate between button styles and also preferred the loading experience. 

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Outcomes

  • Time setup improved adoption of Time by 5% (105 ITC)

  • Number of timesheets created by employees increased by 5%

  • Number of admins inviting employees to track time increased by 5%

  • Increased usage in time tracking features that were hidden in the existing product

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