Welcome to Business Transaction Intelligence

Our product needed a fleshed out welcome experience to onboard new users.

Roles: Experience Design / UX Writing & Content Strategy

Overall Experience

As part of a new effort in our division, I needed to create a guided tour to walk users through the product once they got there. However, that was when the user was already in the product. What about before then? How would they know they even have access to this product? What could they expect when they first log in? We needed to make the pre-login experience more welcoming and accessible, not only for the experienced users who knew all the ins and outs of the product but for new employees as well. We needed an experience that was a bit more holistic.

THE EMAIL

Up until then, we didn’t offer anything to orient new users. In fact, all communications between the product and our customers came in the form of plain text emails, automatically sent from a server and not formatted for human eyes. Our sponsor users said that they had gotten used to it, but also said that it was difficult to read and understand. Reading between the lines, it wasn’t a good user experience. Error notifications and status notifications appeared to be the same. Notifications came too often and became background noise. And there had been nothing to ease them into using the product for the first time once provisioned.

I thought about my experience in using new products, or even when creating a login on a website. Often, the first thing you receive is an email, thanking you for your purchase or your email address, and explaining what the product can do for you. I wanted to do the same thing for our product. While the concept itself isn’t original, it wasn’t the kind of thing that we normally did at IBM. I was stepping away from using the very formal language found in most of the content in favor of something more inviting.

I designed an email that was dynamic and hopefully somewhat aesthetically pleasing. My hope was to simultaneously get the user excited about the offering and help them to get started using it. Users who have purchased the product would receive this email once they were added to the system, either by our team or by an administrative user.

The welcome email concept was shared at a couple different presentations. It received high praise from many in my division, including our former section lead and former Vice President Kareem Yusuf. And more importantly, it began a discussion and exploration into how we could standardize this concept and apply it to other products.

View the original HTML email here. Due to changes in the product and those working on it, links are disabled and names removed to protect privacy.