This case study was originally published in ‘Employee Experience by Design’ (Bridger and Gannaway) and is a great example of ‘EX Design’ in practice.
InVision is the leading product design and development platform for teams building world-class digital products. In addition to a rapidly growing team, InVision is also 100 per cent remote and globally distributed – there are no headquarters and no offices. Manager of employee experience design Marie Kretlow describes how she and her colleague, Dennis Field, took a design-led approach to design a new onboarding program at InVision.
InVision is unique in both culture and how it operates. Our employee onboarding should reflect that. We believe in crafting employee onboarding with intention and maintaining it with care. As such, onboarding is an experience that requires design – design as a practice of solving problems by deeply understanding our users, building solutions to meet their needs, and testing and iterating those solutions until we get it right.
Discover the problem / opportunity
Our first step in redesigning the onboarding process was to discover who our audience was and fulfill one of the cardinal rules of design — having empathy for our users. We did this by bringing stakeholders together to map out the current onboarding experience, from a new hire signing their offer letter all the way through their first 30 days in role. This service blueprint of new hire actions, support team actions, and our onboarding process and tools revealed gaps in the new hire experience. To add depth to our understanding, we added real-world context to the map with direct feedback from our employees through surveys and 1:1 interviews. To better understand the information we collected, we sorted it into major themes. We then overlaid those aggregate themes right onto the service blueprint to demonstrate what new hires were thinking and feeling.
Define the problem/opportunity
Now that we had knowledge of the current-state end-to-end onboarding landscape and our users’ individual needs and experiences, we were able to frame up the greatest problems that needed to be solved. We did this by analyzing the end-to-end map of the experience to highlight strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, and framed these as user stories:
- As a new hire, I want to learn the company culture so that I understand where and how I fit in our remote community.
- As a new hire, I want clearly defined expectations so that I know what’s most important for me to do today, next week, and beyond.
- As a new hire, I want my onboarding experience to be handled with care so that I feel valued and prepared for my role.
- As a new hire, I want to easily get started so that I can focus on my new team and role, rather than system and tool issues.
Once our problem set was well defined and the opportunities within that were recognized, we began exploring what this program could be. We went on a journey to define our north star and illustrated the ultimate vision for onboarding through storytelling. With this being the first company-wide onboarding program at InVision, we wanted to define the vision to ensure that both our immediate team, as well as our leadership team, understood the direction we were headed with the program. To support and evangelize that vision, we outlined a specific mission statement, our design principles, brand concept, and key elements of the experience. We weaved all of this together through a story of onboarding told through the eyes of a new hire. Together, this is what made up our company-wide onboarding “pitch deck” to sell the vision to the wider team.
Develop ideas
Our opportunities, design principles, and mission also served as our anchor and outline through rounds of ideation and concepting. As we’re a fully remote team, we leveraged our own digital whiteboard tool, Freehand, to synchronously brainstorm “how might we…” for each user story we identified. We also spent time individually ideating and providing feedback asynchronously with the commenting feature in tools like Google Docs and InVision as we explored ways the onboarding program could emulate our company focus on “people, practices, and platform”. After much debate and scrutiny, we were able to whittle our solution down into a single, testable minimum viable product (MVP) – or MLP, most lovable product, as we like to call it. We synthesized our ideas down by evaluating what was absolutely essential to the foundation of the program (tools, format, content, etc) through the lens of user impact, business necessity, and feasibility of our team being able to quickly build out the program.
Develop a solution – overview of the MVP
1. Tools – for our MVP, we chose to use tools that new hires were already using (like our pre-boarding tool) and tools that they would need to use throughout their journey as employees (like video conferencing, instant messaging, and our learning management system).
2. Format – the day one experience is critical for any company, but particularly so forfully remote organizations. We designed a five-day program for a new hire’s first week that included daily live, facilitated sessions of our core content, plus ongoing “homework” of onboarding tasks like security training and benefits enrollment that was tiered out over 30 days. Our goal was to run the program every other week to best align to new hire start dates.
3. Content – our framework for the core onboarding content was focused on people, product, and practices. The goal was to create a safe space for new hires to learn, connect with one another and their teams, and get them set up for success at the company.
Test a solution
With a defined scope and short-list of things we wanted to learn, we built a prototype of the MVP program and launched our first pilot test to a small group of employees in our customer-facing department. To learn what was working well and what could be improved, we asked our pilot group to give us daily feedback in the form of a survey, as well as feedback at the end of the week and 30 days in role. We learned that the core components of the onboarding process were a success, with room to refine our content delivery and live class engagement.
Iterate the solution
Since our pilot test in 2018, we’ve made countless improvements, both big and small, and remotely onboarded hundreds of new InVisioners. They consistently exit onboarding feeling highly knowledgeable, engaged, and connected to our InVision community. We’re currently on our third major version of the program, refined through feedback, and it’s proving to be the best yet.
The solution – our latest and greatest onboarding program
We now run our week-long onboarding program once a month. It gives new hires a solid foundation of knowledge about the company culture, community, remote life, and of course, design. And while we believe that the information we share is important for all employees to know, there is one thing that trumps it — their sense of belonging.
To that end, our onboarding class is hosted in a way that feels real to “InVision life”, where new hires are welcomed as whole human beings and are invited to break through the screen as their most authentic selves. Our greatest hope is that by the end of the week, new hires feel connected, engaged, and confident to take on their role. There are a few fundamental pieces of this program design that define the experience:
1.Flip the script. Instead of presenting content in a traditional lecture format, we ask our new hires to learn about the next day’s content ahead of time and show up to class prepared to discuss. Bonus — at the end of the week, each small group reflects on their biggest takeaways and presents a “show and tell” to the greater class. We have been blown away by the creative and thoughtful presentations we’ve seen thus far.
2. Real-time co-creation. Class discussions are facilitated through Zoom, a video conferencing tool, and Freehand, one of InVision’s own products that acts as an infinite whiteboard. We set a goal and outline for each day, but let the conversations lead us where we need to go. Everyone writes, draws, and doodles together — each class’ Freehand is unique.
3. Small group discussion. We intentionally assign small groups to be cross-departmental. By creating a smaller, more intimate space free of onboarding hosts/facilitators, new hires can have open and honest conversations and build bonds that will last throughout their time as InVisioners.
4. All-in attitude. To get the most out of the program and really tune into InVision’s culture, we ask that new hires show up and do the following:
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- Be bold — throw out your questions and ‘bad ideas’. They’re never as bad as you think.
- Say ‘Yes, and…’ — collaborate. Build on each others’ ideas. Help create the community you want to be a part of.
- Lean in — commit! The more you put into the week, the more you will get out of it.
About the process
Without truly and intentionally designing our new hire experience, by first deeply understanding who we are serving, we would not have been able to create a program like the one we have. This onboarding program was our first venture in leveraging design to craft people programs, and we have used it as an example in much of our work since then. We’ll continue to listen to our customers, iterate to meet their needs and do what’s right for the business as we grow and scale. Good design is never done – right now, we are yet again reviewing the end-to-end candidate and new hire journey to look for ways to level up and create an even more delightful and seamless experience.
Find out more about the activities and tools InVision used in our upcoming EX by Design course. We’ll cover tools such as:
- Journey mapping
- Insight and user stories
- How might we questions
