Applying UX Principles to New Hire Onboarding Process
I read a thought-provoking sentence in one of the Nielson and Norman group articles — “Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now”. And there was an emphasis on right now. While it is true that the sooner you start user research, the better it is to start getting more insights about the problem you are trying to solve. But like the quote above says, you can take the step to understand your users at whatever stage you can!
I work in Design-ops at RingCentral and during our discussions with new hires, our team felt that there was some gap between how the UX onboarding process was intended and how the new hires perceived it. This led our design ops team to create a project to try to understand the potential gaps better and attempt to solve them.
Working on this project was a good opportunity to use my design thinking approach and employ some user research principles to understand how new hires feel and what they think about our UX team’s onboarding process.
Objective
The objective of this research was to understand the end-to-end onboarding experience for new hires to gain meaningful insights on their behaviors, needs, challenges, and pain points to make the UX team’s onboarding process a better experience.To achieve this goal, qualitative methods were used — user interviews, affinity, and journey mapping. The different research methods used helped us understand their current experience and identify and prioritize their pain points to find some actionable solutions.
Our Process
Conducting User Interviews
We conducted user interviews for 6 team members who were onboarded in the past few months. It helped us identify their pain points, frustrations and what aspects of the process worked well for them.
The first step to conduct the interview was creating a user interview script that is the foundation for talking with users about your product or service. I wrote a script of questions that acted as a guide during my discussions and it also helped by asking probing questions about what the new hires were thinking and feeling. Questions were asked based on different stages of the onboarding process based on our assumptions of how the current process was — before joining RingCentral’s’s UX team and the first 90 days after joining.
Synthesis of Data
Affinity mapping
This is a quick way to pull out insights from your research notes (typically done using sticky notes) and then group similar insights together to look for common themes.
Once we collected all the qualitative data, we started mapping our insights into clusters. We saw some themes emerge about the onboarding phases — which were very close to our initial assumptions. But it wasn’t time to jump to any conclusions yet! We came up with the following themes-
- Before joining — Pre-interview, Interview, Offer decision and Acceptance to Joining
- After joining — Initial set up, Training and First project
- End of first 90 days
This exercise helped us look at the problem with a new perspective and draw some new connections.
Journey mapping
A journey map is a visual depiction of the actions a user takes and includes their thoughts and emotions. We charted out these themes we identified from affinity mapping to find out what the new hires
- Thought about each phase
- Felt about each phase
- Were frustrated about and their challenges
- Were happy about
- Thought could change from their perspective
This journey map was created using Miro.
Conclusion
We came up with some workable solutions to solve some of the challenges we had identified, and they are being incorporated in our current onboarding process. Our next steps would be to continue this study to determine the impact and compare with previous data.
My takeaways
- Approaching UX processes from a researcher’s lens helps understand the core of the problem.
- Divergent and convergent thinking helps to segregate what is important and what is not to solve the problem.
- To validate your assumptions, thinking from the user’s point of view creates empathy and solutions created thereafter are based on insights we received from their feedback and not simply based on our hunch or assumptions.
- When you combine scientific research methodology with design thinking mindset, it is a win-win for all!
