Appfolio: 6 Hours of Onboarding down to 20 min.

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The Problem

Being new to the market has its perks. There is tons of press, enthusiasm, and overall buzz. Customers were extremely excited to join our newly launched Affordable Housing product. However, our product was in no way ready to scale at a large level, which resulted in our customers' hours (6 to be exact) getting stuck in Onboarding. My product manager, a few engineers and I would sit on these calls manually uploading our customer's data. This was taking us away from our other work with each new customer who sought to sign up. 

The customer’s first 90 days on the platform were tough. Due to the manual nature of onboarding to a compliant software, customers would find working with bad data resulting in miss-calculated subsidy payments. Frustrations would rise, and our customers would eventually churn. 

The business assumed that we were not market-ready yet and needed to build more features to make ourselves more sticky. We were never going to win the feature battle against our competitors, who had been in the market for decades prior to us. They were ready to halt any new customers joining. 

I looked at the metrics that I did qualitative research with customers who had churned. After doing a journey map and further synthesis - it was clear that the biggest impact that we could tackle was onboarding, not pushing out more features. 

After I presented my case to our team, we decided to embark on a two-month sprint to improve our onboarding experience. I was given a short timeline and a huge task! 

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My Role & Highlights

Lead UX Designer

Lead Researcher conducting over 20 qualatiative interviews and usability studies

Conducted a design thinking workshop in order to intrudcuce the overall concept and stategy

Partnered with key stakeholders like customer success, sales and engineering throughout the iteration process

Introduced new compononet to the design system

Define Process 

Taking a 6-hour long process and building an onboarding experience can be a tedious task. I had to ask myself, HOW much of this should be onboarding? Could we have a gradual onboarding? How could we go to a full self-service? Was that possible given the time frame? 

I dived deep into the research. I shadowed our customer support staff, my product manager, and my engineers. Customers needed to upload a very complex CSV that their prior software gave them into our software. There were tenant ledgers, accounting ledgers, correspondence with HUD, the federal government. 

This is where most of the chaos came from. Every software is exported differently, so how could our solution be flexible enough to allow for edits but constrained enough to remain a compliant government software? 

As I headed into the design process, I kept several key findings from the research close: 

• Communicate with Clarity: Errors will happen in any data upload model, I need to be certain that customers know what actions to take after. 
• Switching software is stressful. Customers spoke to the insane amount of hours they spent inputting spreadsheets. We could do better. 
• Time is key. Working in Affordable Housing there are various key deadlines and not meeting them can have major ramifications. 
• Accuracy is key. We integrate with the government software. We MUST be compliant.

I was able to host a design studio with current customers during our Future Conference. I was able to lead the 2 hour long design thinking process that helped address several issues; one of them was onboarding. In this workshop I was better able to understand to

‍Design Process 

As I picked up my design pencil I was excited to find a new solution. I decided to take a step approach in order to keep things less visually overwhelming and provide clarity. 

I continued to meet with customers throughout this process and stayed close to stakeholders. I also showed my designs to our Customer Support Team. We were moving fast! I was learning fast and made several iterations.

After the design studio, I was able to take those learnings and apply them to several medium fidelity design iterations. Without the studio, the problem space would have been far too wide.

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Not everything needed to be done in Onboarding: There were a LOT of needs in the Affordable Housing world. It felt like after every customer call I walked away with yet another step to add to onboarding. At one point I had a 10 step onboarding process! 

A 10-step flow was not going to work. So I learned more about the real onboarding needs and learned that of course, not all customers are the same. How could I allow for a gradual onboarding process? 10 steps and accounting galore would make them flock to customer support for their questions. Customers needed to feel confident and get a “mini win” of accomplishing onboarding. Some of our customers had been using our competitor software for 15+ years so I needed to make a flow that was seamless, and even… fun! 

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I sought to have a modular approach in order to allow for a flow that is flexible. This was a newer design pattern for my company so there were some limitations. I collaborated with the design system to allow a “skip” option and even iterated on this further to allow for a smart enough flow that would know what steps you needed to do once you uploaded your file. 

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I conducted A/B Testing with both the shorter and more gradual onboarding and the longer onboarding. The results were clear. The shorter onboarding with steps throughout the product later performed 74% better (NPS) Right before we launched I added some confetti! 

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Constraints

Affordable Housing is often  done on a cycle. Customers tend to onboard in the beginning or the middle of the year, so testing was nearly impossible. This is also what contributed to our very intense timeline. The solution? I had to test our flow with customers and obtain excel spreadsheets from various consultants to pressure test our system. This resulted in us making  our best guests with what we had.  

What I Wish I Knew & Learnings 

Below are some big lessons learned that I have taken with me to future projects. 

Accounting + Govt Software = many use cases. Given that we were new to the market, there were only a few customer types that we could pull from. As we moved up market, new use cases quickly arrived and I needed to iterate on my designs to consider this quickly. 

A tight deadline and a steep learning curve would delay my process: I was brand new to the team and learning the Affordable Housing space is complex. I had to immerse myself in the full ecosystem of Affordable Housing and communicate with the team about my constraints. 

Build Onboarding Sooner: Some of the biggest constraints came from needing to fit into the data models, terminology, and concepts that we had already ingrained into customer’s heads. A lot of which did not make sense as they were best guesses most of the time. If I had to build the entire product again, I would have started with onboarding. 

Major Wins 

More than MVP: Given the timeline, I am proud to say that we shipped a product that passed our initial thought of MVP. Of course, we learned more and continue to learn more with each customer that onboards, but 

First customer with 1,000 units to self-onboard to Affordable Housing Appfolio history! 

Contributed to the Design System: We had used the step flow before, however, we did not have a dynamic flow that allowed for both forward and backward. ‍

The 6-hour long task was now only 20 min! Gone were the many meetings, triages and never-ending bugs. We had a new feature that was trusted and reliable. 

Next Steps 

Monitor the flow for the next year as we continue to go up market and potentially run into unknown use cases.