Our team was tasked with revamping Pair Anything’s onboarding process to ensure new users will fully utilize the services as well as understand all functions of Pair Anything’s enterprise portal, generating a returning customer base.

I worked as the research lead in a team with three others:

• Nicholas Arthwohl as the project manager
• Irfan Ahmed as the design lead
• Natasha Mozgovaya as the planning lead

To find out what people expected of the onboarding of a business to business (B2B) service, I talked to managers of restaurants who specifically integrated B2B services in their restaurants. This helped us understand what people expect from an onboarding process and teach us what would cause a user to abandon the process.

I analyzed online competitors within the wine and service industry realm that offer B2B services such as Toast and Clover, two point of sales system providers. Learning from their onboarding we found that they both use a linear onboarding strategy. A linear onboarding strategy guides new users step by step through the onboarding process providing videos and examples along the way.

I was able to observe a few things provided by companies during the onboarding process that gave us insight into our design:

• What aesthetics were essential to attract a new user
• What a comprehensive onboarding process looks like
• What key features should be utilized to keep a user engaged

To understand the pain points of Pair Anything’s current users I took the time to go through the onboarding process as a new user to gain insight. Through a heuristic analysis, task analysis, and a user flow I observed these pain points:

To learn more about the demographic that Pair Anything is looking to appeal to I chose to find people in the restaurant world. I was able to source interviews from my former profession as a General Manager of a fine dining restaurant. Many of my former colleagues are past or current managers of restaurants who work directly with wine as well as have integrated B2B platforms into their business.

To learn from my interviews how Pair Anything can improve their onboarding process I needed to come up with interview questions that answered these goals I set:

• What is the general experience surrounding onboarding a new product or service?
• What are the user’s preferences when onboarding?
• How does the user prefer to receive new information?
• Why do users abandon a new product before completing onboarding?
• What motivates a user to complete the onboarding process?

After gathering all of the data from the interviews I led an affinity mapping exercise with my team which led us to a few key points:

We created a journey map to better understand where in the onboarding process a user would get lost or have questions. To understand where and how a user might struggle in the process I created a persona, Joanna. Joanna is a distribution manager for a boutique wine maker looking to integrate an intuitive system for her team to connect customers with new wines.

We follow Joanna starting from when she receives the onboarding email and link. The email provides some instruction on what to do though vague and with no contact information to ask for help. Joanna is forced to navigate back and forth between email and onboarding as the process is not intuitive, leaving her confused. After watching the instructional videos she finds her questions unanswered, further delaying her onboarding.

We take away from this journey that instructions and videos should reside not in an email but be present during the onboarding process. This ensures the user does not stray away from their task and feels positive about the process.

Users who are integrating a B2B platform into their business need a thorough but approachable way to learn how to use new products because they want to feel confident in the tools they employ to elevate their business.

Now that we’ve come up with a problem to solve we need to ground ourselves with some ideas on how we might accomplish an effective solution. Again, with all of the information synthesized and laid out, we collaborated and iterated some ideas on potential solutions:

• How might we make the onboarding experience engaging and rewarding for the user?
• How might we facilitate conversation between the system and the user?
• How might we accommodate different learning styles and needs?
• How might we reduce required effort for users?
• How might we help customers understand they are on the right track or completed the task?

Together as a team we held a design studio. We each took turns sketching in twenty minute intervals iterations of Pair Anything’s current dashboard and what features we think users would benefit from. After two hours of iterating on each other’s designs the design lead presented to the team wireframe sketches with all of our ideas.

Pair Anything currently does not have any sort of interactive onboarding process or readily available resources for their enterprise portal. The design itself only highlights what the user’s task is at that moment in the onboarding process to minimize confusion.

We put together a linear onboarding process with interactive features and prompts to guide the users. Not all users want to start and end where suggested, so we allowed the users to skip any step at any time.

To ensure that users were given the proper guidance we offer a ‘need help’ button at the bottom of the page for every step of the onboarding process that leads users to the help center. In the help center page users will find frequently asked questions, videos, and tips. There users will also find contact resources for over the phone or email support.

I conducted user interviews in tandem with Natasha, our project planner. We wanted to assess how easily and efficiently users can complete the required onboarding steps for the enterprise portal and locate helpful resources.

I had users walk us through the prototype. Users were asked to describe what they see on the page and direct us through the process out loud. A few key tasks we asked the users to perform were:

• Create a password
• Update winery details
• Upload winery background image
• Upload a logo
• Upload at least one wine
• Find helpful resources

To measure the success of the usability tests we looked at how long it took each task to be completed, whether the user was able to accomplish the task without any questions, the number of errors the user had, and if the user indicated any sense of abandoning the product.

From what I learned from the usability tests I was able to suggest a few changes to the designers.

• To align with users expressing their appreciation for simplicity, I suggested that the background features should be grayed out to emphasize the main actions required
• Give users the ability to fill out required fields in any order
• Add an option to upload a CSV file to make the inventory uploading easier
• Add asterisks next to required fields

After all was said and done we had some suggestions on what Pair Anything could do to further our rendition of their enterprise portal onboarding.

• Preview of the winery details page in the portal before it’s published. The user could check how it looks, whether there are any typos, and what is missing, instead of going to the website to check the page after it goes live.
• More information about the wine could be added to target new audiences. Do millennials care about wine’s acidity or the mention of ethical sourcing? Could wine reviews from customers bolster the popularity of the product through social validation, in addition to the experts’ tasting notes?
• Suggested collaborations. As the client base grows, Pair Anything could add to the enterprise portal a feature suggesting potential collaboration between different clients, following algorithm-based matches between wineries and restaurants.