Onboarding for Bodhi Free
Led and developed self-serve onboarding flow for new product line that increased average monthly sales leads by 8% in 2 months. Created product development roadmap and research plan, all prototypes and video assets.
WHO
Solar installers
WHY
Build an engaging first-time experience that demonstrates the value of Bodhi so that installers are compelled to come back to the product and ultimately upgrade to Pro.
WHAT
Project Roadmap
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Persona Development
Problem Definition
Journey Mapping
User Flows
Wireframing
High-fidelity Prototyping
Research Plan
Sourcing Test Participants
Usability Testing
Analysis Workshop
Success Definition
Developer Collaboration
Implemented Third-party Tool
What's Bodhi?
Bodhi provides solar installers with a platform to manage customer projects—from multi-channel messaging and automated project updates to post-installation monitoring. Homeowners can use the web-app to track their journey, store important documents and communicate with their project manager.
Planning & Process
The company decided to move from a Sales-Led-Growth strategy to a Product-Led-Growth strategy based on the business goals to scale up in 2023. This was a big shift to how Bodhi had operated until now and the Sales, Marketing and Product teams had to adjust their annual goals and tactics accordingly.
For perspective, the Pro version of the product requires a heavy hand-held collaboration with our Customer Success team and a number of people at the installation company. To get a new customer launched on the Pro product took, at best, 3 months.
Product Challenges
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HMW create a free experience for installers to onboard to the app on their own?
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HMW create an engaging experience that proves the value of Bodhi within their first session?
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What defines "value?"
Requirements
Defining Value
The big question was "what do installers find valuable?" After a few conversations with Bodhi's co-founder (who also has his own successful installation business in Austin) I came up with a hypothesis for an Aha statement.
Aha Statement
"I am confident of the potential of knowing all my customers are being communicated with and I know when I need to take action."
In order for anyone to pay for the Pro version, or even continue using the Free version of the Bodhi app, this is what they needed to be thinking when using Bodhi. If we could get them to feel this way, they should be willing to see the value of Bodhi and pay for the Pro version.
How do you prove this? I came up with proxy behaviors to help us qualify success. My hypothesis was that by guiding installers to complete these 3 actions in their onboarding experience would build stickiness and lead to higher conversion rates.
Proxy behaviors to qualify success:
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Add 1+ homeowner.
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Sends and receives a message from a homeowner.
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Sorts the dashboard by last communication and takes action.
Requirements
Testing the Hypothesis
After diagramming the right flow and creating rough wireframes, I developed the first mid-fidelity prototype.
Validating the Value
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Do users see understand how Bodhi works to help them manage their customer communications?
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How comfortable are they adding a real homeowner and communicating with them through Bodhi? Why/Why not?
I sourced participants within the field, none of which were currently using the Bodhi platform. Their roles spanned from Chief of Marketing to Project Managers to Sales.
User Sessions
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5 participants
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45-60 minutes each
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Range of roles: Marketing to Project Managers
Results: Round 1
To analyze all the inputs I had received through testing, I created a journey map that approximated the "psych level" for each participant as they went through each step of the prototype.
I conducted a workshop with the Product team to share results and brainstorm new feature ideas.
Describe your image
Main Value Questions
The 2 main questions I needed to answer were:
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Did participants understand how Bodhi works to help them manage their customer communications?
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How comfortable did they feel adding a real homeowner?
Findings
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Looking at the overall trend, the mood slowly declined throughout the interview.
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80% of participants were confident they understood how Bodhi works and saw how it could help them communicate with customers more effectively.
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Yet, only 20% actually added a homeowner.
Results
"I'm confident Bodhi would help me manage my customer communications."
(scale of 1-5)
How comfortable are they adding real homeowners and communicating with them through Bodhi?
So what?
Round one of testing proved that the onboarding flow was successful in showing the functionality of Bodhi. However, there were opportunities to improve the trust factor so users would be willing to add homeowners. I developed an updated list of success criteria for users to realize value and truly adopt Bodhi into their daily tech stack.
Customer must have context
Provide a better explanation of the homeowner's experience. Must see what their customers will be seeing.
Confidence through inclusivity
Encourage inviting team members to get buy-in faster. This reduces hesitancy of adding real customers since users will be more confident the rest of their team will actually adopt the tool.
Should be end customer-ready
Completing branding seems to be a critical piece in helping installers feel comfortable with what Bodhi is showing their customers.
Built trust and value through expertise
More definitive call-outs explaining how a feature adds value and showing data on how others have been successful will encourage engagement.
Showing is faster than doing
Usually doing vs. showing is stickier, but in this case, a quick "How to get started" video at the beginning
Applying the Findings
The Engineering team was still going to be working on building the infrastructure of the new product for at least a month so the PM and I decided to do one more round of testing.
For the next iteration, I applied the insights from the first round of testing to get users adding homeowners and teammates to drive adoption.
Key features:
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Have a preview for any relevant messages or app experiences.
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Ability to choose onboarding experience (tutorial v. self-explore).
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Videos showing the value faster instead of forcing users to do things on their own.
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Emphasis on adding teammates to provide a wider net for adoption at the company.
Testing: Round 2
The main goal of conducting another round of testing was to determine if directing users to add themselves as a homeowner vs. allowing them to explore on their own was more successful in engaging users and getting them comfortable with the product.
The Marketing Team had added their content to the new website so we also used this an opportunity to observe how new users would navigate our updated website. Would it compel visitors to sign up for free?
Main Questions
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When is the right time to prompt users to add a homeowner?
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Does the website compel visitors to sign-up for free?
Findings
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100% of participants added a homeowner but there were pros and cons to each flow. When adding themselves as a homeowner as the first step, people were confused about what was happening. When adding a homeowner as the last step, participants understood what was going to happen next, but were only comfortable adding themselves. And one went "rogue" and dismissed the onboarding guide all together and immediately added themself as a homeowner.
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Ensuring users have the opportunity to review all templated messages that could be sent to homeowners was a new friction point for many of the participants.
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100% of participants were able to find the sign-up for free button. All were able to explain why they would or wouldn't actually select it in a real-life scenario.
Results
Is it better to prompt to add a homeowner at the beginning or end of the onboarding experience?
Does the website motivate visitors to sign up for free?
Launching Bodhi Free
Working with the UI Designer, we built a high-res prototype to share with Engineering. Given the looming deadline and the scope of work estimated by Engineering, it was determined a third-party tool was going to be the best solution to build the most effective onboarding experience for the upcoming launch.
I vetted a handful of options and chose to go with Userflow. It's an incredibly intuitive and customizable product allowing us to nearly identically recreate our mocks. They also offer helpful usage analytics! This took a great load off our Engineering team and gave me and the rest of the Product team more control over what and how the onboarding flow was built.
Conclusions
Analyzing the Userflow data and feedback from prospects I presented weekly reports to the Sales team. After 2 months, I used this data and my UX expertise to build a second iteration of the Userflow onboarding experience.
This version streamlined the copy focusing on the value of each feature the onboarding flow highlighted. I created short videos to support the value statement at each step.
The company hit hard times and I was let go before this version officially launched.
Outcomes:
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We saw an average increase of 8% in sales leads within the first 2 months of launch.
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With a relative low user pool, it was challenging to gauge what was working or not based on numbers alone.
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Time is money. Even if you have time to do another round of testing, be sure it's worth it. Looking back, we could've pushed forward with handing off to developers after the first round of testing and iterated as needed after launch.
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