B2B products are normally complicated with a wide variety of capabilities. They often require technical or business knowledge in order for their customers to become active, productive users of the product. The journey from Discover, Try, and Buy to active usage is therefore complex, time consuming, and varies by user types. If the users are not able to easily use a given product or service during the onboarding process, they will be likely to give up early and cannot unlock the product's potential benefits.
Our goal was to research the best practices and leverage Augmented Intelligence (AI) technology to help improve the onboarding experience and to attract and retain new users in a Business to Business (B2B) context. In this project, we chose eCommerce as our focused domain to explore the problems as this project was not limited to IBM technologies/products or their competitors.
Users can earn reward points during the onboarding process that could be used to extend trials or purchase apps upon activation of plan. This feature will help drive users' incentives and encourage users to complete essential onboarding steps.
Our AI assistant Shoppie will monitor users' movement based on onscreen activities to quickly understand users' needs and attempt to solve the problem in an automated way. Users can also switch to voice mode to directly talk with Shoppie and let it take control of store setup process.
Users answer a series of simple questions to obtain the most suitable template that works best for their goals and business needs.
To get started, we conducted domain research to decide which domain to focus on. As the project was not limited to IBM technologies or products, we explored a variety of industries such as health care, finance, insurance, and decided to chose eCommerce based on team consensus. We chose eCommerce as a research focus because: 1) the industry is growing rapidly especially during the global pandemic time due to Covid-19, 2) Many of our team members have acquaintances in eCommerce which would help make our future participant recruitment easier.
Once we identified the domain, we focused on asking the below questions to help understand the industry landscape and formulate interview questions.
In addition, we also used comparative analysis to learn about existing onboarding flows across eCommerce platforms. This practice allowed us to build interview questions that are specific and targeted to the industry, as well as learning from the current successful onboarding tactics.
In order to build empathy and stay in touch with users' needs, we interviewed 15 sponsored users to gain feedback about their onboarding journey using different eCommerce platforms.
I first created a screener to help identify our targeted users. We aimed to look for participants who have experience of using at least one eCommerce platform. The participants were mainly recruited from the professional network such as LinkedIn and social media platforms such as Facebook and Slack groups. These participants represented a diverse demographics, from small business owners to individuals with side hustles. This was to make sure the user data we collected was less biased with high reliability.
The interview took 45 minutes to complete and covered questions from why and how users choose a specific eCommerce platform to what benefits and challenges they discovered during their onboarding process. Below were some example interview questions that we asked participants. For full details of the interview questions, please click here.
We used coding method to extract key information from interview transcripts and categorized users' problems under different themes.
We learned that the problems were mainly coming from the two themes: management & operations and customer experience. We focused on these two categories and delved deeper into the affinity diagram by gathering some quantitative data to understand the statistical distribution over the sample. Below are some of our key findings:
Based on the interview, we concluded the following insights:
How might we improve user onboarding journey using Argumented Technology that allows customization to different skill levels and learning styles for eCommerce platforms?
I created the below sketches to visualize one of the user flows in registration and customization process. I also drew a landing page that showcases the entry-point of onboarding.
After discussion with the team, I iterated on my sketches and created medium-fidelity prototype that covers the steps from registering and choosing a theme during the onboarding process. To let users choose whether they would like to go over the personalization questions at their own pace, we let users build a sense of control of their own onboarding while providing tailored experience.
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