User Onboarding & Team Formation
For data security, I have omitted confidential and private information in this project. All the data in this project belongs to me
Lark is a collaboration suite designed for business.Launched in March 2019, this collaborative suite struggled to scale alongside the diversification and fulfill the hyper-growth of user needs. In 2021, Lark's onboarding phase was challenged by fundamental usability and data security risks.
Having interned as a UX designer, I worked cross-functionally with the UX team on product development, business strategy, and engineering teams. In the spring and summer of 2021, we were dedicated to implementing Lark6.0 (LRP). For three months, I fully participated in the design of user onboarding and member invitation design process under the mentorship of Jian, a senior UX designer at ESUX.
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Through qualitative and quantitative research, we defined the problem, reiterated the wireframes, and ideated the final design with cross-team collaboration. Here is our generalized achievement and impact:
As a next-generation collaboration suite, Lark differs from other office tools in methods of use, organization charts, and potential goals. However, many users cannot realize Lark’s full potential due to fossilized habits.
hard for user to find the right digital solution
when collaborating, the challenge of syncing process appear
At the outset of this project, we did not have a clear mission or pre-existing goal for the design of the team onboarding process. Therefore, I partnered with data analysts, user researchers, and product managers at different phases to embrace the evolving and changing user needs within the onboarding process across user registration, function exploration, member invitation, and team formation. Below is our research and design process:
We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase. The key insights that define the pain points in the registration process are
Market research shows that the average registration time of DingDing, one of Lark’s benchmarks is 37.3s. However, our backend data shows that our users need 121.4s to complete registration.
Through customer interviews, our users are concerned that the platform is collecting irrelevant information, such as gender, age, and personal interests, with one user saying, "I feel exposed, and that makes user comfortable.
Our designers envision more efficiency for the user experience. However, the business team was concerned that the new strategy would deter stakeholders. To gain buy-in, I collaborated with two user researchers and conducted three interviews with SMB and TikTok stakeholders that confirmed the appropriateness of our design decision.
Old Workflow
New Workflow
Upon successful login, users will see eight pages of illustration in Lark's previous feature tour. However, users do not want to spend time reading through pages of instruction, so they choose to skip this section. To verify my assumption, I asked the data team to read the information related to the feature guidance step and visualized the data in the following pie chart: Less than 10% of people will complete eight-page feature instructions (see the orange section of the chart).
There is a misalignment between users’ preconceived assumptions about Lark and its true potential. As an office platform, we see ourselves as a unique flagship, but users treat it more traditionally. For example, data from the data analysis team shows that over 40% of users know the characteristic of"cross-function" (see the orange section in the first chart).However, the product penetration rate on cross-function is lower than 20% (seethe orange section of the second chart). Under such a contrast, how should users realize the potential value of our platform?
(A pie chart of use situation of Lark.)
(A pie chart of use situation of Lark)
(A pie chart of use situation of Lark)
With insights from competitor analysis and expert interviews, I determined that guiding new users through their first platform use would be a better strategy for Lark. Then, with further research, we adapted different instruction solutions to different instruction stages to make it less noisy but more engaging.
(Solution assessment based on usability tests and customer feedback.)
(How I approach the final design decision based on product assessment.)
To ensure that this design strategy can be successfully applied to our platform, I also conducted an AB Test with assistance from the product management and business development teams to support our assumption. Finally, I made the final design decision based on the expected result from the test result.
A: previous design effect
B: iterated design effect
The hyper-growth of Lark sounded an alarm to other business platforms inChina, such as WeChat Work (Tencent) and DingDing (BABA). Those companies started acting to hinder the path of Lark's expansion. They block the spread ofLark's invitation links on their platforms. The lagging method of member invitation exacerbated the downstream trend of new users joining
inks sent to other platforms are
blocked without notification, which may lead to credibility loss during our branding image.
The competition between ByteDance and Tencent results in user loss in Lark
Potential users do not entrust our platform when errors occur
I start with a minimum quality bar to enable the invitation of users for all contexts. In this case, we curated several ways to spread member invitation resources:
With a clear information structure based on the penetration rate for each method and information density, we have developed seven different design sketches for team member invitations:
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