IT-блоги • How We Used Arctype to Improve User Onboarding

After you’ve finished collecting user feedback from your interviews, you will have a wealth of data, but it will be unorganized and indigestible. The end goal of conducting this user research is ultimately identifying actionable insights that can be turned into development tickets for the engineering team.

Making Sense of User Feedback

One tool that we commonly use at Arctype is affinity mapping. Through this process, we’re able to quickly group together insights and bubble up themes, and develop a sense of what’s most important. Affinity mapping is usually completed in groups, but with zoom fatigue, we’ve been trying to do more activities asynchronously. To run an effective asynchronous affinity mapping process, we borrowed some tips from the map-reduce model of distributed computing. Here’s what we learned.

1. Assign everyone a clear set of interviews to be responsible for.
2. Everyone contributes observations, learnings, and ideas to a shared document.
3. Mark which interview each insight came from and this will serve the dual purpose of seeing how many times each insight occurred.
4. For the first iteration of grouping, the focus is just creating any groupings to organize the mess of notes.
5. Take a second iteration to try to create some high-level MECE framework for categorizing all of the groups.

After going through this process with our own user research, we had seven major groupings appear that could be categorized into either Product or Design insights. Product insights relate to building the right product, and it can include things like identifying a target user, refining your core value, etc. Design insights make sure your users can use the product. This can be things like navigation, information hierarchy, etc. For a quick primer on UI design principles, we highly recommend Don Norman’s 6 principles.

The original problem we wanted to solve was increasing the percentage of users who connect a database. Going through this process allowed us to review our database connection experience with fresh eyes, and we discovered a lot of things to be improved. A key finding for us is that we have two different types of users: those who already have a database and those who don’t. These two personas had different problems, but we were not fully solving them for either. In the next section, I discuss how we took these insights to design a new user experience.

Designing a Better Experience

A problem that spanned across both user personas is that our existing database connection screen was “overwhelming” for new users. At Arctype we want to create the simplest tool for a developer to go from a database to queries, so we knew we had to fix this. The database connection screen is the first screen that any new user sees, and we immediately throw a lot of information at them. Multiple groupings of buttons (Gestalt), 20+ CTAs drawing your attention, etc. In order to streamline the entire process, we decided to introduce a paginated onboarding experience.

A dedicated onboarding experience would allow us to guide users through the database connection flow, and it would also enable displaying different screens depending on which user persona they fall into. 

These are my tips for when you’re at a resource-constrained startup and want to move fast on designing a new experience:

1. Research best practices. Spend 1-2 hours just reading and taking notes. Don’t worry about your designs at this stage, this is just to prime you in the right mindset.
2. Great artists steal. Look at the UI from large companies with large design budgets. We marked up Asana's onboarding experience in Figma to get a feel for the elements they used to make it great.
3. Don’t be scared of LoFi. Use existing design components where you can (radio buttons, input boxes, etc), but feel free to just use shapes for the rest to keep up the momentum.

By the end of the week, we had created an activation dashboard, conducted user research, synthesized insights, and designed a new onboarding flow. We had a review with the engineering team, and then it was time for implementation!

Measuring the Success of The Redesigned Onboarding

It’s always important to measure the success of your efforts. This is a great time to pull back up that Arctype activation dashboard you made at the beginning and review how your metrics have changed. We just launched our new onboarding flow, and we want to hear what you all think! Download Arctype here and let us know how we can continue improving our experience. We’re excited to continue working together to create the best SQL client for developers.