Pair Anything aims to connect restaurants and individuals providing the information needed to pair any drink with any meal.

Currently, Pair Anything provides wineries with the ability to showcase and sell their products to their customers, as well as suggests ‘old world’ cuisine pairing. Pair Anything is also working with Target Wines to integrate pairing suggestions for wines that are sold in store.

In the future, Pair Anything hopes to give sommelier-level food pairings from any cuisine to any drink such as sake, tea, soda, and non-alcoholic cocktails.

Our Challenge

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

THE TEAM

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

Initial Objective

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 a 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.

EVALUATING AND PROCESSING:

Uncorking the Product

Understanding the Competition:

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.

Analyzing the Service

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:

Getting to Know Potential Clients:

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 resource 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.

I wanted 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 lead an affinity mapping exercise with my team which lead us to a few key points:

Simplicity: Users want to see simplicity in design and functionality. Simplicity provides users a base perception of what is to come in terms of service and product.

Seeks help from product resources: Users often need help. Questions should be easily answered through a FAQ page, videos providing insight on features, or should be provided with an option to use AI chat or live chat to quickly find answers to their problems.

Prefers reminders and progress evaluation: Users prefer to see some sort of calculation on their progress through the onboarding process. This keeps them on track and assures them of a time frame in which they will be able to complete the onboarding process.

Self-Sufficient: Most users will find their own solutions to their problems by referring to online resources outside of what the service provides. Users will also consult more experienced users before contacting a representative of the service.

This quote provides to us a valuable take of a new user's mindset while undergoing a strenuous onboarding process - “If the onboarding process is super challenging it is a sign for what’s to come.”

Making Sense of Our Findings:

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, Joana. 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 Joana 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. Joana 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 on an email but present during the onboarding process. This ensures the user does not stray away from their task and feels positive about the process.

A User's Problem:

The problem we wanted to solve is that 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.

.... But How?

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 layed 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 & needs?

How might we reduce required effort for users?

How might we help customers understand they are on the right track/completed the task?

Decanting and Serving:

Design and Prototype

Group Design Studio and Prototype

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’s 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.

Our Approach

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.

Testing the Prototype:

Testing The Prototype

I conducted user interviews in tandem with Natasha, our project planner. We were wanting 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, and the number of errors the user had, and if the user indicated any sense of abandoning the product.

Where Can We Change?

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

To make sure we aligned with user’s expressing their appreciation for simplicity I suggested that the background features should be grayed out to emphasize the main actions required.
To give users the ability to fill out required fields in any order
Adding an option to upload a CSV file to make the inventory uploading easier
Add asterisks next to required fields

Glass Empty

What's Next?

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: user could check how it looks, whether there are any typos, 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?

As the clients’ 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.