FINISHED Onboarding Strategy

Date

August 2019

Goal

Build a strategy for the platformOS onboarding flow.

Method

Structured interviews with platformOS users to learn about their developer background and how they use platformOS focusing on both struggles and successes.

Results

We interviewed 20 platformOS developers. Their developer experience ranged from junior to senior.
We identified how long they have been using the system and what key aha moments users experienced while using the platform, what struggles they faced, and how they solved them.
We identified three main onboarding routes that can fit for all personas:

• Non-technical: Non-technical users, like Agency Owners, PMs, or Business Analysts will go through the 1-click instance creation scenario and then install the blog module with one more click. This will result in them having a fully functional platformOS site with a layout, some basic design, a blog, and a Get Started article on their blog that describes how to add and edit blog posts. They will have all documentation available as simple instructions on the same UI, and they will also have a demo video.

• Semi-technical: The journey of users who are a bit more technical still doesn’t require much coding. They start with the same 1-click instance installation but then can pull a platformOS site from a GitHub repository and use the instance they created as a sandbox. They will have the documentation available on the same UI, but as this is a bit longer and more complex, we are planning to display it in a way that they can have the steps of the process as a whole and then explore each step in more detail.

• Technical: The third journey is that of experienced developers, who will get into coding their own blog module based on our detailed Get Started Guide. We chose this scenario because it is a deeper exploration of the first scenario, where the same blog module is installed without any coding, so they can already check what the result will be there.