Onboarding: Guiding users to success and increasing activation rates:
Woba's app lacked an onboarding process. This means that users were left to explore and understand the product and its features on their own. Without a structured onboarding experience, users struggled to use the product effectively, leading to underutilization and missed opportunities for engagement.
In this project, I designed an onboarding flow to guide user's to the first book, collect their preferences and boost activation rates.
Result: +9.7 p.p., representing a 30.5% uplift in Activation Conversion.
The problem
Through analysis made throughout the quarter using tools such as UxCam (heatmaps, flows, funils) Amplitude, and user interviews we noticed that:
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Users do not fully understand the product’s value and features.
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Lack of educational guidance results in suboptimal product usage.
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There is no structured way to collect user data and preferences.
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User engagement and retention suffer due to the lack of a guided experience.
The objective
Our goal is to create a new onboarding experience that:
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Encourages users to complete their first booking.
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Helps build habits around product usage.
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Collects user information for future segmentation.
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Educates users about product capabilities to increase activation and retention.
The why
A well-designed onboarding experience can significantly impact product success by:
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Increasing activation rates (percentage of users completing their first booking within 7 days).
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Reducing time-to-convert (how quickly users make their first booking after signing up).
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Improving retention (ensuring users exposed to onboarding continue engaging with the product).
The discovery process
To build an effective onboarding process, I conducted:
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Desk research on best practices from case studies, industry insights, and onboarding strategies from successful apps.
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Competitive benchmarking to analyze visual references and onboarding flows from similar products.
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User interviews to identify pain points, expectations, and opportunities for improvement.
💡Key Insights from the interviews:
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Lack of clarity: Users struggle to differentiate between workspace types (shared spaces, meeting rooms, and event spaces).
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Some users expressed a desire for the app to guide their booking decisions based on their needs, for example: coworkings with TV/Projectors to enable virtual meetings, spaces open until late for late workers.
Challenges
In our user interviews, a common issue came up: first-time users struggled to understand the difference between the various spaces they could book like meeting rooms, workstations, and event spaces. My challenge as a product designer was to show our value propostion and make these differences clear in a simple and straightforward way.
If the onboarding clarifies the "why" and "how" of the product, users might reach the habit loop phase faster because they already have a mental model of what to do next.
Designing with intention
To make our onboarding effective, we had to keep it minimal, avoiding a long, overwhelming process that could lead to drop-offs. Every screen was designed with intention.
One trick I used to prevent users from feeling overloaded was incorporating microinteractions.
Right from the start, users see an animation showcasing the different types of spaces available, inviting them to choose the one that suits them best.
After that, another animation pops up, showing users in a more literal way, our spaces possibilities.
Profilling and segmentation
A technique I used to collect user data and preferences is the profilling.
Profilling helps understand users by categorizing them based on behaviors, needs, goals, and preferences. In this project, our goal was to collect user preferences like: product or content categories they prefer or specific features they frequently use.
But how can we collect these preferences if there are 3 different types of spaces with different types of users?
In order to direct users to questions related to the product they are using, after the first onboarding screens, users are invited to answer which space type they are more likely to use. Depending on the anwers, users will encounter different questions related to the space they've chosed.
Profilling
We kept asking questions to gather user preferences and build their profile.
Some questions appeared on the same screen, but only after the user answered the previous one, reducing interaction cost and keeping the flow smooth.
Impact
After one month of launch, here are the key results:
✅ 39% completion rate – Out of 283 users who started, 111 completed all questions and got their first personalized experience. While this might seem low, it's actually a strong number—studies show that the average completion rate for similar apps is around 19%.
🔗 Link to study can be found here.
💎 We also ran an A/B test:
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Control (no onboarding): 31.8% conversion (28/88)
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Variant (with onboarding): 41.5% conversion (49/118)
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Result: +9.7 percentage points, representing a 30.5% uplift in conversion.
Conclusion
The implementation of the new onboarding process has already shown promising results, improving activation rates and enhancing the user experience. By guiding users through their first booking and educating them about the platform, we increased engagement and streamlined the decision-making process.
The A/B test results demonstrated a significant uplift in activation, reinforcing the value of a structured onboarding journey.
Moving forward, we aim to refine the experience further by:
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Collecting user preferences,
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Enhancing personalization, and introducing cross-sell opportunities.