Rebuilding onboarding was the first big bet the growth org took on after I started. At the time the conversation was that we believed activation rates to be much lower than should be, but that radical changes were warranted to deliver the magnitude of impact we desired. This was unique for the growth team in two ways: 

A need to depend heavily on user research and qualitative insights vs historical quantitative data. 

How we developed and prototyped the experience before launching it (more on that below).

We compiled prior quotes and anecdotes from years of user research that, when combined, painted a pretty clear picture of the opportunity: give users a helping hand and do some of the heavy lifting for them, so they feel ease and delight as they learn the building blocks of Airtable. It’s like providing an instruction manual and an extra pair of hands alongside a daunting pile of legos.

Lauryn Isford

When working to increase the Activation Rate of teams using Airtable, my team moved from using tooltips to a guided onboarding flow, creating a 10% lift in Activation.

We believe that there is room to unlock a substantial increase in activation rate of teams using Airtable. Today, users struggle to build and deploy their first workflow on Airtable in their initial sessions and first month using the product, which then leads to reduced long-term retention.

We believe that a fundamental overhaul of the initial onboarding flow will increase activation rates for new Airtable users and teams. In specific, we hypothesize that an onboarding tutorial which guides users to quickly and easily build a workflow will be more effective than our existing passive tooltip/feature-based approach. This is supported by our user research showing that users commonly express the desire and need for Airtable to more effectively 

help them quickly and easily setup their first project.

After - Guide to Build Your First Airtable Workflow

+10% lift in Activation Rate (W4MUA: Week 4, Multi-User Active Rate)

+15% lift in Build Rate (% of new teams that build a sophisticated workflow)

-5% drop in Onboarding Completion Rate (% of new teams that make it to the end of onboarding)

 We weren’t seeing the results we wanted from incremental optimizations, but we were also nervous to spend multiple months investing in a single change. Investing in a more significant overhaul gave us room to make bolder changes and ultimately deliver bigger impact.

. Most of our competitors were using tooltip onboarding. We tried something different, and this yielded a step-change in improvement.

. Fewer teams complete onboarding (early drop-off), but more teams activate successfully (long-term retention). We should be willing to make this kind of trade-off, if our highest-intent users are more likely to be long-term successful.

Sometimes growth experiments depend heavily on qualitative input, not quantitative.

 Much of the success of this project can be attributed to findings from user research. Building what customers wanted helped us unlock big impact that we wouldn’t have been able to uncover with data analysis.

We believe we can see additional improvements to this new onboarding flow by introducing personalization, where users are able to build something that fits their need or initial use case/JTBD.

Onboarding experiment result for guided set-up at Airtable

Problem 🧠

Hypothesis 💭

Experiment 🧪

Results 📊

Sign up to see more