SaaS B2B · HR & Operations · 2024
Onboarding
redesign:
a first
day worth
staying for
67% of new accounts never completed the initial setup. Customer success was flooded with tickets. The 90-day churn was critical. It wasn't missing a feature: it was missing a path.
+41%
Onboarding completion · 45 days from release
−55%
Ticket CS for the first 30 days
−18%
Churn to 90 days
* Real data. Company name omitted for confidentiality reasons.
67% never activated.
The product worked.
The journey didn’t.
A B2B SaaS platform for HR management had a structural problem: two-thirds of new accounts never completed the initial setup. Not because the product was difficult, but because the user was presented with an empty dashboard with dozens of features available and no indication of what to do first.
The team's response was to add a tutorial. Then a second tutorial, more detailed. Then an onboarding video. Then an email sequence. Each addition had helped a little, but the underlying problem remained: the product did not lead the user to their first moment of value.
The result was a customer success team that was flooded with "where do I start?" tickets from accounts that had already seen all the tutorials but still didn't know how to get started. Two full-time resources were devoted exclusively to manual onboarding of new customers.
The problem wasn't the lack of documentation. The problem was that the product had a single generic dashboard for all users, but its users had completely different goals: who wanted to manage attendance, who wanted to configure payroll envelopes, who wanted to board their employees. Three targets, only one route. It's not personalized.
Context of the report
HR & Operations
Product Designer
Design, tooltip
A/B
No tutorials.
Maximum value
from the start.
The guiding principle: a well-designed product doesn't need tutorials. If the user needs to read to understand what to do, the product has a design problem, not documentation.
JTBD Research · Week 1 to 3
Interviews with 15 active users and 8 churned users using the Jobs-to-be-done framework. Central question: "When you first opened the product, what did you expect to be able to do within the first hour?" The answers defined 3 archetypes with completely different objectives and no overlap in the initial priority tasks.
3 separate routes · Week 4 to 7
Design of three distinct onboarding flows: one for attendance/fairs managers, one for payroll managers, and one for onboarding employees. Each path hides sections irrelevant to that goal and shows only the 3-5 steps needed to reach the first concrete value. No functionality removed, just rearranged by priority.
Empty states and tooltip · Week 8 to 10
I re-created all the empty product states: instead of "You haven't added employees yet", they now displayed "Add the first employee to start managing attendances, it takes 2 minutes". Zero pop-up at the start.
Testing and release · Week 11-12
A/B testing on new accounts: 50% old onboarding, 50% new separate routes. Measurement of time-to-first-value (first completed task), completion rate at 24h, 7 days and 30 days. Complete release after 15 days of testing with confirmed statistical significance.
The principle of empty states
Every blank screen is an opportunity to talk to the user. An empty state that explains what to do in that specific context is worth more than any general tutorial. The user does not want to read the documentation. He wants to know what to do now, on this screen, to achieve his goal.
The most unexpected JTBD
The third archetype, the one who had his employees on board, had a need that had never been mapped: he wanted to be able to make a good figure with the team, showing off a professional tool. The goal was not technical; it was emotional. This completely changed the tone of empty states and progress messages for that path.
2 FTE released
−55% of CS tickets in the first 30 days had a concrete effect on the organisation: the two resources dedicated to manual onboarding were redirected to high-value activities such as expansion revenue and key account management. Design that works frees people.
45 days.
4 metrics improved.
+41%
Onboarding completed within 45 days of release
−55%
Ticket CS within the first 30 days of registration
−18%
Churn to 90 days (the metric that really matters)
2 FTE
CS resources released and redirected to expansions
The −18% 90-day churn is the most important metric in this case study, not the +41% completion rate. Onboarding completion is a leading indicator. The 90-day churn is the business result. What shifted the churn wasn't to have more people complete the onboarding; it was to make each user understand, in their specific path, that the product was exactly what they needed.
Does your onboarding hold or lose?
The first day
shapes retention.
If your customer success is flooded with "where do I start?" tickets, the problem isn't the documentation, it's the design of the onboarding. An audit will diagnose him in 60 minutes.