GitLab Growth, 26 Mar 2021

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From YouTube: 2021-03-31-UX Showcase: New user onboarding strategy

Description

A quick intro into the Growth UX team's work for shaping a strategy for the new user onboarding. For more info, check:

- Strategy overview issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/299979
- First-mile strategy issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/299983
- WIP prototype of the First-mile vision: https://www.figma.com/proto/M7zltjY5ftRHoIXuYHF7En/first-mile-vision?node-id=6%3A698&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=6%3A697&hide-ui=1

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Hello, my name is mate.

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I'm a senior product designer on grove here at gitlab, and today I want to talk about the new user onboarding strategy that the ux team here on grove has been working on for the past few months, and I want to start with why I felt we needed a strategy like this and the main reason for it was so that we don't just focus on the metrics and the kpis which in the past sometimes led to conducting one small experiment after another, but and possibly even without the vision of what we're trying to achieve.

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But instead we wanted to come up with an optimal user experience in balance with the business goals and then break that down into small experiments, which is the opposite approach.

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I also felt we needed a better coordination among the four growth teams because we all work on the new user onboarding. Now, in the past, we worked on separate areas of growth and there was a rare case where product designers actually outnumber the product managers on our team at the moment, and we felt it's a great opportunity for ux to take the lead a bit more.

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So the new user onboarding is made up of three main parts, now open the image separately, so we can see it better and yeah. It's the start, the first mile and continuous boarding. The start is just where do our users come into this flow of signing up and into the onboarding, which is which landing pages they land on?

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And how can they proceed then to sign up the first mile is the signup flow itself and then showing the value of gitlab, and the final part is continuous onboarding, where you actually start to teach our users how they can use gitlab, how they can set up features and back to the issue, the I did some work in the past for the growth expansion team, uh which was focused on increasing adoption of gitlab through user invitations and by conducting conducting some ux research and speaking to other team members in the company we concluded that there are two approaches to gitlab adoption and it's either bottom up or top-down, and the bottom-up is simply an individual signs up for git lab.

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They see some value in it and they start advocating it to their team and eventually a small team or a group of individuals will start using gitlab and through time more and larger teams in that company will be using gitlab. The other one is the opposite, of course.

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Usually it's a case where the company leadership decides that they need to a better devops solution and they dictate basically that a pilot team will need to test these different devops solutions and gitlab is usually among these tools that are tested, and if the pilot will gitlab is successful, it will the adoption will spread, spread to other teams, and sooner or later, most individuals in the company will be using gitlab, and this work helped shape the free scenarios of the news or new user onboarding, which I will open here in mural.

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So we can see them better. So the three scenarios are, a single person explores git lab the second one is multiple people try a pilot project on gitlab and the third one is a company-wide gitlab adoption. So the first one is, the persona is usually a devlid or even a software software developer.

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The likelihood of the three scenarios is the highest, so I rated it five out of five, but the interest level at this stage is quite low right. This signing up, they don't know yet what they will see.

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I outlined the user goals and key on boarding areas and our goal as well, and some timeline and key moments in in the user, onboarding and then the second scenario is multiple people trying a pilot project on gitlab right. So usually it's again a development lead a couple of software developers or maybe even a devops engineer. The likelihood by default is quite low, but the interest level for those that get to this scenario is a bit higher. Again, I wrote out the user goals, our goals, game boarding areas.

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I won't go so much into details here and then the last one is company-wide gitlab adoption. We see a larger group of people adopting gitlab, possibly even product managers, project manager, managers, designers and people like that. The likelihood by default is quite low for this to happen, but it for the teams that get to this level. The interest level should be quite high right. They at this point they're solving it again.

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User goals are goals, keyboarding areas, actions required, but here's the most important part of these scenarios here they are mapped in a chart comparing the likelihood and interesting gitlab, and we can see that yeah that scenario, one the interesting gitlab is quite high, but the likelihood out of these three is the highest one, but here's the tricky part if we do scenario one really well, if we design like a really good experience that signs up users relatively quickly and then shows them the value, it will increase the interest in gitlab and with that the likelihood of scenario, 2 and scenario number 3 will increase as well, and it's the same for a scenario number two.

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If we do that, experience really well if they learn how to use gitlab how to set up features and stuff. Like that, the likelihood of scenario three happening, the likelihood increases basically again.

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So that's the in a way the overview part of the strategy work that we have been doing, and now I will go more into the first mile, which is the one that I'm focusing on and kevin is working more on the continuous onboarding. So he will talk about the details and the work he's been doing there.

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um So the first mile part is basically, as we said right this- the sign up, part and then showing the value of gitlab and to start with this work, I wanted to understand what the mental model of our users is when they start the sign up process. So I wrote down a couple of questions.

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I mapped out the mental model and in in this case I mapped out the current experience and the potential future experience as well yeah. You can see here existing steps and possible future steps. I also added icons mapping out the steps that should be completed by the user on their own, but they can't and some of the crucial areas can be explored by users which is like merge requests.

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They just can't start a magic quest from an empty state page, and I also map out the possible aha moments so see how cold reviews work and see widgets on a merge request right.

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um This map helped me identify the the three goals that I believe we should focus on with the first mile part of the new user onboarding, and these are that it should take less than 10 minutes to complete users should understand the groups in the projects, how they're structured, how they work, what the relationship between them is, and they should get some code into gitlab so that they can start exploring features right and the three key steps to to get there are they should get.

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They should see how they can collaborate on code, uh so they probably should interact with the merge request feature. They should see that they can integrate um with other tools, so they should see that we have a feature of project integrations and they should also see that they can do quite elaborate, ci cd stuff with gitlab right. So they need to explore our ci cd features.

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After that, I also mapped out an ideal vision.

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Like user journey, so what it should be in the future- and this then helped me create a prototype for this first mile vision, uh but I I only got so far as the sign up flow, so the first part of the first mile um so yeah the user, starts on the marketing website.

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They start a free trial, signup process. They choose the gitlab.com option, they need to fill in the sign in the signup form, and this is where our first mile basically starts. So we're asking them about their role and why they're signing up for gitlab? Is it just them or is it a company signing up for gitlab?

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We want them to create a project and for them to create a project. We also want them to create a group, because in this way they understand right away. Okay projects belong into groups because they will see it by the url and then they need to fill in some extra information to start to activate their free trial, basically, after that, they need to confirm their email.

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So we are considering improvements to all these pages, confirm the account and we're also considering improving improvements to this final sign in page, which at the moment is the default one, with all the extra information on the left side and some information below it. We want to clean that up and pre-fill their email as well, so that they just need to input their password and click sign in, and then this part of the first mile is done.

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Then comes the second part, so it's showing the value of gitlab, which we haven't started working on yet, but we have two main ideas: one is we could create like a sandbox project for them where they could interact with existing merge requests. They could see pipelines in actions, they could see.

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Project integrations being set up already stuff, like that, and the other one is improving the project overview page.

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So that's currently looks like a simpler option and possibly with an option that could have a bigger impact, because, right after this step of signing in, we could drop them into their project that they just created so on the empty stage project overview page, and if we do the improvements well, on that page, we could show and tell them, with with a project in gitlab, you can set up project integrations with tools like jira slack and similar.

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You can set up pipelines, you can collaborate on codes through merge requests. You can create issues, so you can manage projects epics everything right um so we'll see we. We are thinking that we'll start the work on these ideas in this milestone towards the end of this milestone and possibly in the next uh one or maybe even two milestones as well, and, to conclude, I want to share some of the results that this that's creating.

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This strategy enabled basically and the main result that we're seeing is we got the buy in from the product managers and other stakeholders in the growth team.

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um So that's really good, because the ux team in growth is actually, as we said, uh taking the lead on it and we're also seeing better collaboration among growth, designers and product managers as well, which leads to better coordination among the four growth teams, because we now work on. We all now work on the same experience. We need to be better coordinated right and it also helps us coordinate with other teams outside of growth.

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So we can share our results, learnings and get feedback from them and currently we're working closely with create and verify, because we're trying to increase the adoption of these stages and in the future, maybe we'll we'll after we design the new user onboarding in a way that it's in a really good shape will possibly move to increasing adoption of other stages as well.

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That's it for the new user onboarding strategy overview and the first mile flow, which is the part that I'm focusing on and kevin, is focusing more on the continuous onboarding. So he will talk more in details about his work there and that's that's it. Thanks for watching.