How to Design Onboarding Experiences Using Journey Mapping

Onboarding is the process of helping new customers or clients get started with your product or service. It's an important part of any business, because it can help you convert leads into customers/clients, build relationships, and ensure that they have a positive experience.

In this blog post, I'll share how I used journey mapping to improve my client onboarding process. Journey mapping is a technique for visualizing the customer experience, and it can be a valuable tool for identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Steps in My Onboarding Process

My onboarding process consists of 4 phases, each containing multiple steps:

1. Client Inquiry

2. Free Consultation

3. Proposal/Contract/Questionnaire

4. Invoice/Project Kickoff

Below, you can see my Client Journey Map (with these phases, steps within each phase, and tools) that I created in Figma. It walks you through my user persona, Fiona Harris', journey (including background information, her actions, and emotions) throughout my onboarding process. Her journey is based on my observations and interactions with my clients so far.

Note: The pain points, goals, and motivations of my user persona were much more important in shaping the user journey than the age or industry.

Online Tools for User Journey Mapping

I used a template and customized the text, images, and style in Figma’s free version. A few other online platforms that offer journey mapping templates include:

1. Lucid Chart: Customer journey map

2. Miro: Customer Journey Map Template

3. Nielsen Norman Group (option to download template is towards bottom of the page)

Each template utilizes a slightly different format and asks for different types of information. However, they all provide a visualization of the customer/client experience across different phases of their journey with your product or service.

Journey Map with Lucid Chart:

Client/Customer Pain Points

💲Hiring a web designer is a big investment for business owners, and can be stressful, especially if they’ve had a bad experience in the past or are new to the process. There are quite a few requirements (i.e. proposal/contract, questionnaire, etc.) that I have in place before officially starting my clients' projects, which are important, but also contain a lot of information that can be difficult to digest.

💡While my clients signed the contract, paid the deposit, and submitted the questionnaire, I’m sure if there was a way to skip this and get straight to the project without sacrificing quality they would. That said, I make sure to explain the importance of each of these steps during our free consultation/email correspondence to make them as streamlined as possible. As you can see on my User Journey Map, the feeling is neutral/pleasant for my user.

Positive Highlights

✨I try to provide exciting or joyful experiences for my potential clients shortly after they experience some uncertainty or steps that require work on their part. For instance, they may have feelings of doubt prior to the free consultation, so during this meeting, I make sure to show interest in their business/goals, answer any questions about services or pricing, provide information about next steps, and encourage them to reach out if they have more questions.

✍️When I send out the proposal/contract and questionnaire, I let my clients know that the next step is the invoice and once received, I can get started on their project. When their deposit payment is received, I let them know when I’ll have the first draft ready for their review. I find that by including something to look forward to during the more tedious parts of the onboarding process, encouraged my clients to finish their part of the process more quickly.

Issues with Onboarding My First Client

While I successfully onboarded my first client, meaning that she signed the contract, paid the deposit, and we’ve moved forward with her project, there were some issues in the onboarding process (see below):

1. Too many options - At the time, I had both customized and templatized web design options available. The customized options also included 3 tiers. Additionally, I offer other types of A La Carte services. After the consultation, I had to send two different proposals prior to sending the contract. This added another step to the process.

2. Too many steps for content collection - For my first client, I had both an onboarding questionnaire, which included questions about their goals, style preferences, etc., and a separate form for content collection. After my client submitted the questionnaire, she indicated that she was excited to get started on the project. Instead of giving her another long form to fill out, I decided to ask her a few questions during our 1st project meeting. However, going forward, I planned to revise the form to include all necessary questions.

3. Too many separate steps and emails after free consultation - For my first client, I submitted the questionnaire, proposal, contract, and invoice all in separate emails. While some of these steps have to be separate - for example, I can’t receive payment before we agree on the project deliverables, scope, timeline, etc. in the contract, I found that consolidating some of the steps would help streamline the process.

What I Changed

Here’s what I changed for each issue mentioned above for my second client project:

1. Removed the templatized design option (no longer posted on website/didn’t bring up during consultation). This made it easier to explain my services, plus I could include the proposal with the contract and in turn, reduce the number of emails and steps for my client. Finally, while some clients may initially like the idea of using a pre-made template (which was cheaper than customized services), this won’t necessarily be the best fit for their website needs or for me to deliver the best results.

2. Included all the questions needed for me to build their website (including collecting written and visual content) on one form. Also, offered a customized level of assistance with content creation based on what my client wrote on the form. For example, I asked if they had any company and/or team photos they’d like to use for their website (the form had a spot in that question for them to directly upload these photos).

3. After free consultation, I sent the proposal/contract (in one document), the onboarding questionnaire, and next steps in one email. Once the contract was signed, I sent the deposit invoice. Since I indicated that once these were all complete, I could start the project, my client completed all these steps right away. Instead of sending 4 separate emails, I ended up sending 2.

Note: Both of my clients came from referrals/network connections and it was clear that they were ready to purchase and get started with their product during our free consultation. If this wasn't the case, #3 might not apply.

Below, is a snapshot of how I think my user’s emotions changed after I improved my onboarding process (I also successfully onboarded my 2nd client, and the process was faster and smoother). My conclusions were drawn from observation of the length of time for my clients to respond, emails I had to send to re-explain or re-ask for something, questions my clients asked me during the onboarding process, and direct comments from my clients about their decisions/the onboarding steps.

🔎While collecting direct feedback from clients/customers can help solidify/verify my observations, I believe that observing my client's behavior and communication throughout the process helped a lot and allowed me to make improvements right away. My changes centered around reducing the number of emails/amount of work for my clients, providing more clarity around the services that will help my clients' businesses, and communicating exactly when my clients will get their first deliverable, which I think will be appreciated by most.

Do I Need to Conduct More Research?: Factoring in Risk

It's important to consider whether or not more research is needed before implementing certain types of changes and if/when conducting that type of research is feasible. In my situation, I plan on asking for direct feedback about onboarding/other parts of the project at the end. However, both client projects are still in progress, so I decided to move ahead with my changes, which were LOW RISK (in terms of time, money, client experience, and project results). If the changes you're thinking about implementing are higher risk, and/or there's a good opportunity to conduct further research, then it may be worth considering a different type of approach.

General Tips for a Better Onboarding Experience

✅ Try to consolidate or remove any unnecessary steps. For optional steps, include an easy way to skip.

✅ Look at the emotions of your customer or client. Try to remove anything that may cause negative emotions. If it’s a step (such as contracts or invoicing that may not be very fun), try to make the process as clear and streamlined as possible.

✅ Try to provide some sort of incentive or positive experience right after a step that might be difficult for your client. Hint that the incentive or positive experience will occur as soon as the more difficult step is completed.

✅ Offer an easy way for your client/customer to get in touch if they need help or have questions.

✅ Offer your client choices, but not too many.

Onboarding experiences and best practices can vary depending on your industry, services/products, and target audience, so these tips might vary depending on your situation. A tool such as a user journey map can help you visualize the journey for your specific customer/client persona, steps, scenario, etc. and then iterate on your process from there.

Final Thoughts

In this blog post, I've shared how I used journey mapping to improve my client onboarding process. By identifying the pain points and positive highlights of the process, I was able to make some changes that have made it more streamlined and enjoyable for my clients.

I hope the templates for the User Journey Maps are as helpful for you as they are for me. Being able to visually outline the steps and user emotions at various touchpoints helped me better understand and improve my clients' onboarding experience.