Onboarding time tracking admins
How might we establish confidence and create a seamless first-time experience for admins?
DESCRIPTION
Admins use QuickBooks Time to track their team’s work hours.
As a scrum team we knew the first-time experience of setting up time tracking for the business needs to be improved. I led the research and designs of the project, and created a guided setup experience for new users.
Role
Lead designer and researcher
Additional impact
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Helped refine project scope
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Contributed to defining milestones for project implementation for MVP vs target state designs
PROCESS
During the course of this project, I led the design efforts for two project teams.
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Project team 1: Improve the onboarding experience for new time tracking users
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Project team 2: Make critical time tracking settings more accessible to these users. My role involved not only designing but also collaborating closely with the product manager to define the project’s scope.
Because of my research and design strategy we were able to validate that both teams would benefit from combining the efforts and created a seamless first-time use experience
Research plan 1
For re-designing first time use experience
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Contextual interviews with 10 new users
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Contextual interviews internal customer support who work with users directly and help them with setup specific questions
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Review usage data of old first-time-use experience
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Concept testing with users and internal customer support team
Research plan 2
For re-designing critical time tracking settings
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Reviewed usage data of settings to identify the criticality of settings
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Contextual interviews with new users to understand how often they used settings and why
Research plan 3
For creating a user-friendly setup experience that guides new users through essential settings and allowing them to personalize their application
Concept testing end-to-end user experience with new users and internal customer support.
DESIGN DECISIONS
From our research synthesis I found that users dont want a long task list as a first-time user. They want to personalize based on their business needs and feel confident in their setup.
Make time tracking setup easy
Customers found the old setup to be longer and more complicated than expected
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
Customers felt there was too much to setup before they could even test the product. 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.
Let users personalize their setup
Customers complained that the old setup didn't look relevant to their business's needs. They also found critical features they need were hard to find.
Referring to the usage data we picked top 5-6 features that users with advanced time tracking needs would be interested in. This provides a way to customize setup and also helps users discover features that exist in the product.
Information layout
Users want to review critical settings during first-time-use. They trust QuickBooks to set the right defaults for them.
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.
Outcomes since launching new first-time-use experience
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Improved adoption of time tracking features by 5% and has resulted in total $ 3.5M increase in revenue every year
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Increased user’s confidence resulting in increase in number of companies inviting their teams to track time by 20%
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Time saved for users and customer care experts