Hostmaker Dashboard - Creating a flexible onboarding platform
Reverse-engineer Hostmaker Onboarding process, rethink it as a better experience for their players (clients and employees) and create a new journey, thanks to an optimized platform.
Brief
Hostmaker dashboard is the main online platform that allows the user to interact with their property and oversee its management from the comfort of their home.
In the old version of the platform, every time one of our hosts wanted to “onboard” a new property, they had to start a several months journey, crossing online forms, email communications and phone calls. Navigating through the different sections of the dashboard was confusing. For some users, it was simply faster to contact their account manager.
In order to reduce friction, take the pressure out from the client support teams and make the communications more efficient, we started the onboarding user journey redesign.
UX research
The UX research process started with an observation stage and sequence of internal interviews, in order to be familiarized with the current processes, the different teams involved in it and the differences between different markets. As a result, we mapped out the current process and presented it to all the stakeholders.
According to the internal team members, we highlighted pain points and the most common unhappy paths.
The biggest concerns from the team were:
1. The amount of chasing communications: they used to spend a lot of time trying to reach the users to remind them about pending tasks.
2. Communicate well the task priority: if the user knows clearly what task to do next, the process would become much faster.
The next step was to understand the user perception of this journey, check if the information was being well received and list the points that are actually the biggest obstacles for the users. The user journey was the base to develop a user interview investigation.
Architecting an ideal solution
The entire user journey was redesigned according to the new insights.
The new onboarding process would be centered in the online platform (dashboard) as the main touchpoint.
- The new form made the process quicker: reducing the number of questions during the first part of the process, delaying the most sensitive ones for later, when the lead is more solid. Organise it a lower number of input fields. Use practices like auto-filling and auto error validation. Deleting repeated fields. Make navigation and completed percentage always clear. Avoid questions where the user needs to write, replace those with easier interactions. And a very important topic: delete the waiting moments in the journey.
- The entire journey would be focused on the online platform as the main touchpoint. The entire list of tasks and their priority should be listed in the new UI. Email communications would only be used to reinforce very important messages. Phone calls would be used only in unhappy paths.
- The new UI must be flexible enough to inform the user about the next task, but to allow them to complete any task they want in the first place.
- The UI must include a way to point out different tasks that need to be highlighted. This way, the team members can request important actions to the user, using the same touchpoint.
- Finally, a complex user journey has a lot of different possible dropping points. It required the use of gamification techniques to minimize it.
These corrections were implemented and analyzed sprint by sprint, with metrics.
It’s time to design some cool stuff
The dashboard homepage was redesigned in order to communicate, in a glance, the status of the property and the onboarding progress percentage.
The onboarding sections allow the user to move through different questions of the form or start with other required actions.
The flexible UI allows the user to continue the process after finishing the main tasks, to reduce the waiting times.
The navigation through the flexible form and the error validation interaction were proposed and validated in a quick usability test.
Urgencies and priorities are communicated with the new highlight tooltip module, avoiding the email chains that would make the interaction more complicated.
Project Tags
Companies
Hostmaker
- Technology