Converting confused triallists to confident subscribers
Onboarding new users to MYOB Essentials
Accounting is not a strong point for many small business owners. They want to get these jobs out of the way so they can get back to their passion of running their business. MYOB helps small businesses across Australia and New Zealand do just this — with products such as MYOB Essentials they can easily manage their invoicing, payroll, tax obligations and more. However, when they first sign up, business owners are often confused and don’t know where to start. This project aimed to guide users through the first mile of using Essentials in the free trial period and to give them the confidence they need to ultimately subscribe.
For this project, my team was focussed on creating an intuitive and inspiring onboarding experience for new users to MYOB Essentials. We improved the trial experience so that users understood what they could do in-product and, more importantly, how it could help them achieve their business goals.
The challenge
New users trialling MYOB spend very little time in product and visit very few pages, and the conversion rate is relatively low. These triallists aren’t getting a good experience with our product on their first use, so they aren’t sticking around to convert and get the full benefit of the software. How might we improve new users understanding of how MYOB can help them achieve their goals so that they engage more in the trial and ultimately convert?
My role
During this project, I made the transition from Graduate Designer to Associate Designer. Therefore, I initially took a more supportive role in the research and inquiry stage before taking on the sole design responsibility for the team.
I was involved in every part of the design process, from initial research and synthesis to ideation and facilitation, and finally visual design and building front-end experiences.
Starting out
Like many other subscription products, MYOB Essentials offers a free trial to potential customers so that they can feel out the product and see whether it’s right for them before they commit. This trial is fully featured and allows users to see exactly what they’re getting. Despite this, in November 2017, almost 50% of triallists spent less than 5 minutes using the product and visited 5 pages or less. Essentials is a fairly comprehensive product, and you would expect these numbers to be higher if the person trialling was seriously considering and trying out the features and functionality. From all free trials created in that same month, less than 20% converted into paying customers.
We wondered why these numbers were so low, and how we might improve the in-product experience so that triallists seriously consider MYOB when purchasing accounting software. The onboarding project was part of a larger initiative looking at improving the standing of the MYOB brand and product across the small business community.
How does MYOB compare to our competitors?
Firstly, research was conducted to benchmark the MYOB experience against direct competitors. As a graduate designer, I assisted three UX Researchers in this project and conducted some of the interviews with their guidance. Overall, we spoke to 12 people from various industries and of varying age, gender and race demographics.
This research asked participants to compare the experience of several small business accounting products, including MYOB, and for the second round, participants were also asked to take out a trial of MYOB Essentials. From this research, we learnt a lot about users consideration process for new products and got our first insights into their impressions of the trial and our product.“The trial dashboard looks a little bit overwhelming at first glance, it’s all one colour… I don’t know how to start.”
“It feels business-y, account-y, grey and that’s not my strong point.”
“I actually found it confusing and the terminology wasn’t helpful… I really got lost from the first page.”
“There’s a sense of messing up and causing a ripple effect. I want to try a few things and if I make a mistake I can easily fix it.”
This research cumulated in a few key insights:
Users feel like the product should be intuitive and easy to figure out — but it isn’t. They can’t see how the product will immediately help them.
They think MYOB is for people with more accounting knowledge than them, and feel pressure to get their first use right because of potential impacts on financial data.
Users view the trial as a time investment and imagine it will take a lot of effort to see the value of the product. They don’t have any way to fast track that understanding.
What makes a good first use experience?
I also undertook some desk research to determine the industry standard for onboarding, and to get inspiration on how we might improve. This research stressed the importance of helping users achieve their goals, rather than the goals you think they should have, such as setup tasks. Onboarding should also show how their lives could be improved by using the product, focusing on what jobs or struggles we could remove from their lives, rather than showing the features.
This is hugely relevant to the accounting space, as small business owners generally don’t enjoy keeping track of their finances. We learnt from our research that they want a way to do this quickly, accurately and with as little effort on their behalf as possible. Essentials could help with these jobs, we just needed to show them how.
This knowledge, our research insights and the data above pointed to the need for a team focused on the trial experience, and in particular the ‘first use’ or onboarding within Essentials.
Experimentation
When the new onboarding team was created, it didn’t initially include any development resources. Instead, it included a small number of people working on quick, lean experiments.
Within this crew, the majority of my work involved facilitating ideation based on research and data, translating these ideas into designs, and implementing the designs within WalkMe, an in-product messaging tool. Within this tool, I did a lot of CSS work to create a visual identity for onboarding consistent with MYOB’s style guide, Feelix.
The majority of our experimentation revolved around increasing in-product guidance within Essentials so that new users had a better understanding and would further engage. We wanted to immediately show how the product could help them while getting them set up for success.
We worked in fast iterations, releasing a new experimental experience to triallists every 2–3 weeks, and closely tracked the performance of the experiments using telemetry data. We measured metrics such as time spent in product, the number of pages visited, and conversion rate.
Despite this work, there was no noticeable improvement in the metrics, meaning the experience for our new triallists was also unchanged. I believe that this is because there is no silver bullet for solving the problems listed above, and the experience needs a complete rethink rather than many small things. It is also the nature of such a complex product to require a complex solution.
We knew from our research that there are many different reasons someone might trial accounting software, but there was no way for us to figure out the reason held by each user coming through to the trial from the website. Moving forward, we needed to understand specific groups of users and target them with experiences that were truly valuable to them.
After about three months of experimentation, a full development team was dedicated to the task. This meant we were able to take on more complex tasks, such as personalisation, creating an example business and adding empty states to the product.
Learning more about triallists
The full team came together in August 2018. For our first initiative together, we decided to learn more about our triallists.
Before this initiative, the only information we had about someone coming into the trial was their email address and their phone number. These were collected via the sign-up form, and neither were very helpful in creating a tailored experience for new users.
For this experience, I helped facilitate ideation and prioritisation workshops. I also created visual designs based on Feelix and tested a prototype with small business owners.
The first piece of information we collected was the user’s business name. It seems very simple, but previously these users would have to go to a complicated Settings page to enter this. We could now populate the business name on their dashboard and where it was needed throughout the product, giving that first little touch of personalisation.
The second piece of information we wanted to collect was the users’ industry. From research conducted by the marketing function of MYOB, we knew that different industries had different motivations and reasons for using software, and we knew what jobs they wanted to get done.
For users, this meant that we could better tailor their experience to their industry, an initiative that is currently in progress across the organisation. This helped not only with in-product experience but also with supporting functions. Our email marketing teams were able to tailor their communications, too. Our phone teams, who call every triallist within the first few days of them starting their trial, were able to use this information to have more valuable conversations with clients. Internally, it meant that we understood our customer base better, and could make better business decisions.
The last piece of information we decided to collect in this experience was whether our new triallists were students, or using the product for educational reasons. We chose to do this as our phone support team were reporting high numbers of students on their call lists. These students were very unlikely to convert and didn’t need the help of our team. When we implemented this experience, we found that over a third of new triallists were in fact students. Knowing this information meant that our phone team could better prioritise their calls and spend time speaking with people who really needed the support.
The future of trial experience
The future of trial experience is looking bright. There are so many different things that we could try, such as improved empty states, checklists and more inline help. As a design team, we brainstormed and worked on our own projects to imagine the future, and to ensure that we’re ready when it comes.
