About the project
Overview
The onboarding process marks the beginning of the Sora experience, where families and students submit the necessary documentation to ensure their first day at school is successfully prepared by the end of the process.
Over the past two years, as the school experienced growth, several issues began to negatively impact the onboarding process and the overall operations of the school.
The challenge
Improve the school onboarding process to create a seamless and straightforward experience from both the user and service perspectives.
The business goal was to streamline the onboarding process, ensuring that at least 50% of users completed it within one week during the first month of the MVP launch.
My role involved deeply analyzing the experience to understand the workflow, users' needs, and service requirements, to streamline the process as effectively as possible.
of users complete onboarding within one week (first month of MVP).
Discovery
Exploring user needs
During this initial phase of the project, I discovered that recent user research had already been conducted. My task was to evaluate the findings and share them with the team. The key insights from the research were:
- An overly overwhelming process across emails, PDFs, and external links was confusing families.
- Parents and students are given the same links to complete checklists, causing confusion between families.
- Users frequently needed to fill out the same information across multiple documents.
- Lack of a schedule for the completion of the checklist.
Uncovering service flow
The next step was to understand how the service team managed the onboarding process from a behind-the-scenes perspective. So I initiated a service blueprint in collaboration with the administration team to map the entire flow, uncover needs, identify gaps, and highlight key opportunities for improvement.
- Organizing groups of students at that time was messy, cumbersome, and very stressful; they needed a better way to organize this hierarchically.
- There was no way to track families' progress at that time; they needed a tool to do this.
- Instead of trying to improve the current manual process, we decided to centralize the entire onboarding experience inside the Portal.
- By analysing the current checklist, we reduced 33 checklist items to 13 by removing redundant and duplicate content.
Ideation & Definition
Discussing opportunities and defining priorities
Once the blueprint was complete, we collaborated to explore the opportunities identified and propose feasible features from both technological and business perspectives. The key highlights identified were:
- Possibility to track families' progress and organize onboarding groups through the portal.
- Create a streamlined checklist and task structure, and provide earlier access to users on the platform.
- Remove external links to avoid confusing navigation.
- Review all content and rewrite the checklists and tasks to remove repeated information and simplify copy.
Solution prioritization
With the key problems well defined, we began brainstorming possible features. We ensured that the prioritized features were technically feasible within the time and resource constraints, and that they would meet the needs of both users and the administration team.
The features prioritized were:
- A checklist structure with onboarding groups, assignments, checklists, and tasks.
- A report where admins can see families' assignment status and organize families by onboarding groups.
- Separate parents' / students' checklists and tasks, to avoid confusion in delivering tasks.
- A trigger for the internal team to move families to the next stage of onboarding.
Understanding the onboarding division hierarchy
To effectively design the user flow, we first needed to understand the hierarchical structure of the school's onboarding process. This step provided clarity on the flow's complexity and was a crucial phase for the development team to begin estimating potential deadlines.
Families onboarding tasks flow
The flow for families and students was designed to provide:
- Seamless and intuitive navigation through checklists and tasks.
- An easy way to identify next steps and complete the process.
Service flow
The service flow was designed to meet:
- Families' assignments throughout specific grades, campuses, start dates, groups, and other departments as needed.
- A place to create checklists and tasks for specific onboarding departments.
- Tracking of families' progress throughout the onboarding process.
Sketch to success
With the strategic plan set up, we started the wireframes to validate the main product structures with the devs and the design team. Our primary goal was to validate whether the chronological order of tasks and checklists was clear from the students' perspective, and to ensure that the hierarchy of the administrative flow functioned smoothly.
Prototype
Families onboarding interface
We began working on the families onboarding interface. Our main objective was to offer a more streamlined and organized way of dealing with checklists and tasks, which would improve the overall progress of the onboarding process and keep everyone up to date on the status of each task.
The key parents' and students' solutions were:
- Separated tasks for parents and students.
- All the tasks located in the same place.
- No more duplicate information.
- Earlier access for students and parents.
Admin's onboarding management interface
Building the administrative interface was a challenging task due to the complexity of the internal team's workflow in managing the checklists and tasks of the onboarding process. We had to work closely with stakeholders to make crucial business decisions while overcoming several technological limitations.
Despite these challenges, we created a core set of features that would streamline the onboarding process and make it more efficient for both the internal team and families.
The key administrative solutions were:
- Ability to assign users to specific groups.
- Ability to monitor parents' and students' progress.
- A way to separate tasks between parents and students.
- Ability to monitor group status.
Families report
The families report serves as a hub where the internal team can add or edit families' information to join a campus and onboarding group. In addition, the admin team can use this report to monitor the onboarding status of each family.
Creating checklists for families
Once families have been added to an onboarding group, checklists and tasks can be created, and families will soon be able to start the school's onboarding.
Usability test
With the interfaces completed, a usability test was conducted with the administrative team to validate the service flow. Overall, we addressed minor improvements, and users considered the interface a usable and seamless experience.
Conclusion
Business goal and KPI validation
One month after the feature launch, the team had the opportunity to validate the business goal and the KPI established for the project.
of students and parents completed onboarding within one week.
Objective was 50% within one week during the first month of the MVP.
