Onboarding  experience (NUX)

​​

​​

How I knew

​

The users told me directly. "I have to sign in to many systems and then download several reports to complete my tasks," one Meta accountant put it. A PM framed the stakes higher: accountants work brutal hours at close, and the goal wasn't just a faster close, it was getting people home to their families.

 

Accountants trust Excel and distrust new processes by default. Onboarding was where that trust would be won or lost.​​

​

My goal

​

Build the in-product content that moved ~300 migrating teams who've never seen it to confidently close the books, onboard to new flows, follow guided tours, UI text, button labels, error messages, notifications and earn trust fast enough to break decades old Excel habits.​​

​

My process

​

I started from how the audience needed to feel, not what I wanted to say.

• Relieved that faster processes finally existed.

• Secure that the tool reconciled their data accurately.

• Motivated to spend the time they saved adding value back to the business.

 

That target response set the tone: informational, reassuring, supportive and above all, sensitive to people racing a tight deadline.

​

I kept the language familiar, clear and consistent to build trust on contact, and told users what was happening with their data at every step, processing indicators that explained how long an upload would take and where the data came from, error messages that said why and offered a clear path out, a product tour that led with the value prop before the detail. For MVP I shipped a welcome page, a new-user experience and a phase-one product tour to onboard partner teams quickly.

 

Request for design data

I defined the metrics this experience should be measured against so we could prove what was working and cut what wasn't:

​

• Offline training hours before vs. after the NUX to track whether the experience actually reduced training burden

• Number of people who see the NUX modal to size the total audience

• Number who exit before the last slide to gauge how many don't find it valuable, and whether a modal is even the right approach vs. a product tour

• Number who complete the modal to indicate how well it helps people understand product changes

• Drop-off per carousel slide to pinpoint exactly where interest falls away

• Time spent per slide and across the full modal to confirm whether people are reading the content or skipping it

 

What I learned

In-product content is my favorite kind of writing, and enterprise is where it matters most. Knowing a real person leans on a tutorial or an onboarding flow I wrote to get through their workday is the whole motivation. Designing for users who distrust anything new taught me that content's first job often isn't to inform, it's to earn trust.