Revolutionizing HubSpot onboarding: a templated approach to boosting user adoption
In my role as Design Lead for Growth at HubSpot, I led the design of a new onboarding experience aimed at increasing new user adoption, by automatically setting up their CRM on sign up.
Understanding the problem
As a full-featured customer platform, HubSpot offers a very wide range of CRM tools to help anyone set up and manage their business online. For example, you could explicitly state that the diversity of tools, while a strength, can overwhelm new users, leading to decision paralysis. With so many tools to choose from, how can they quickly evaluate and find the functionality they need, before they leave and focus their efforts elsewhere? Separately, we knew these business owners often faced time constraints, and lacked the technical expertise needed to navigate the complex steps to set up a CRM.
Through multiple rounds of user and business research, building up over a period of years, we had developed a very clear understanding of these needs. We set ourselves the goal of creating a user experience that not only streamlined the sign up process, but also used the information provided by users to automatically recommend a customized CRM template. In terms of business needs, we knew we needed to drive an increase in Activation, our core metric for indicating whether a new user is actually using the platform (and thus, more likely to become a paying customer).
Process
I began the process by co-leading a design sprint in the Google design sprint methodology. We worked through an intensive 5-day plan to understand the problem, sketch and ideate, decide on ideas and needs, create a prototype and test with users. Based on the insights we gathered, we ended the week with a strong sense of the scope and needs of the final output.
Following the design sprint, we moved into the core design phase. Key considerations included how to effectively gather essential information from users without overwhelming them, and how to use this information to recommend the most suitable CRM template. Prototypes ranged from simple forms to interactive setups that dynamically-adjusted questions based on previous answers.
Usability testing played a crucial role in refining the prototypes. Real users were invited to test the different versions of the sign up process, providing feedback on their experience, any confusion or friction they encountered, and how well they felt the recommended templates matched their needs. This iterative testing and refinement cycle continued until the design met the project's usability and satisfaction goals. We spoke to a broad range of existing and potential HubSpot users, and these insights influenced key decisions around form interactions, sign-up steps, and template options.
From the start, we knew it would be crucial to take stakeholders along with us. As this project was considered business-critical, we took a highly-proactive stakeholder management approach, giving stakeholders clear, frequent opportunities to provide feedback and guidance. We also delivered robust weekly updates to filter through to senior leadership, along with constant progress check-ins on Slack. This approach helped us to stay flexible to the changing needs of the business, contributing to the project’s success.
Outcome
The new templated experience resulted in a dramatically shorter sign up time for new users. Adoption of the new templates was high, with user testing indicating that users found it much easier to get started with HubSpot, as the basic setup of the platform was already complete by the time they reached it.
We saw significant improvements in our core metrics. Free Activation, which measures the percentage of users activating their accounts without immediate payment, saw an increase of 1.52 percentage points. This indicates that users who adopted a template were more likely to start using their new tools. Data Activation, representing users who actively input data into the CRM, increased by 12.6 percentage points, suggesting that the template recommendations effectively encouraged users to start using the system more extensively from the outset. Lastly, the Invite Rate, or the rate at which new users invited others to join the CRM, increased by 7.34 percentage points, reflecting higher satisfaction and perceived value among users, prompting them to share the tool with colleagues. These results demonstrate the positive impact of a user-centered design approach on product adoption and engagement.