Getting the Buy-In

Upon my initial audit of the site, I discovered not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different dashboards, three different header navigations, and two very different onboarding experiences.

Each department, as expected was attached to their particular initiative, so I knew streamlining the experience for our users would take some convincing and onboarding would be my biggest hurdle.

So how did my team and I do it?

1. We listened, meeting with department heads and team members from sales, marketing, and bizops. We got the history of the projects and asked questions about their goals.

2. I showed them what our users see. I took over a conference room mounting all the different experiences on the walls. Anyone who had a meeting in there would be immersed in the same chaos our users were. (This initiative led me to win the award Most likely to turn a conference room into a scene from A Beautiful Mind.)

3. We started small. Everyone could agree we didn’t need four different dashboards, and thus the streamlining began.

4. We identified the problems that resonated across teams. Two onboarding experiences, collecting different information, using different language meant any changes we wanted to make would take twice as long in design and engineering. Plus, it would be harder to get clean a/b results. And neither experience reflected the current brand.

5. We set constraints to avoid scope creep. We knew there was a lot we could do to improve the experience, but we also knew getting something out the door faster would increase the likelihood for buy-in.

6. We positioned it as a test. We would only push 100% of traffic to the new experience when we could definitively say it was outperforming the old experience.

7. We iterated. We got input from other teams after the experience was live and made improvements incrementally so we could have clean test results as to what was making an impact.

And the results?

1. An onboarding experience that collects the same information, so our sales team knows what information to expect from each and every applicant.

2. An on-brand experience, so users don’t feel like they are jumping from one ecosystem to the next.

3. AND, 50% increase in desktop top-of-funnel conversion.

Additional case studies