Project: Design an Onboarding Flow for Commonlounge

Overview

In this project, you’ll be working with the Commonlounge team. In the last project, you improved the HomePage for Commonlounge. This one is closely related to that and it may force you to revisit some of your decisions. In this task, you’ll be designing an onboarding flow for a new user that signs up — you’ll have to think through the most common user flows, map them out, and see where you can add value to the user’s experience.

Problem

Currently, once the user signs up, they are sent back to the page where they initiated the sign up. While this may be great for the user since they can get right back to the task they were working on, the team feels that when the user eventually ventures out to learn what other topics the platform has to offer, they have nothing but the list of all offerings on the home page. We want to seek answers to the following questions:

1. Do we need an onboarding flow to know the user better?
2. Where in the user flow would this new onboarding flow be inserted?
3. How do user outcomes improve by having an onboarding flow?

Solution

An onboarding flow, right when the user comes to the home page for the first time after sign-up could be a solution. But we’re not sure — we need your creative input in both discovering current problems through user interviews, as well as coming up with a possible onboarding flow solution to solve them.

Device & Platform

The solutions you come up with should work on Desktop Web. Extra bonus for making it work on Mobile Web.

Hints and ideas

If you’re feeling stuck, you can take a quick peek at few ideas from the team:

How about a multi-step onboarding process that asks the user about what topics they are interested in, and how familiar they are with that topic — and then recommending them a 1-3 courses that best fit their needs?

You may take a look at other learning platforms like Coursera, Udacity, EdX etc. and see if they do anything special to find out more about the user after they sign up.

You may find more inspiration by looking at some great onboarding breakdowns at https://www.useronboard.com/

Deliverables

1. User Research: Find 3 users who are close to the personas you created in earlier project. Run a usability test on them to uncover problems with discoverability of courses. Summarize your findings in terms of what worked and what didn’t work. (You may be able to use research from the HomePage project for this step)
2. Solutions proposed: For things that didn’t work and for things where you see room for improvement, propose solutions that you think will help improve the onboarding flow.
3. Flow Diagrams: If necessary, create Flow Diagrams for any solutions that involve multiple states/steps.
4. Wireframes: Draw out wireframes on paper for your proposed solution. Go back to the users you talked to in Step 1 and run a usability test on them.
5. Prototypes (Optional): Mock a hifi prototype of your wireframe in a tool like Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD.

How to upload your deliverables?

Hit the Reply button below and create a post with the your Deliverables. The Commonlounge team will give feedback on every submission. In addition, please feel free to critique other submissions — there’s a lot of room to learn from each other.