About Krystal Higgins
Krystal Higgins is a senior user experience designer who loves tackling complex design challenges. An area she is extremely passionate about is the onboarding of new and existing users. She shares tips for designing in-product education on her design blog and maintains a collection of onboarding reviews from websites, apps, and other products.
In addition to teaching teams about guiding users, Krystal designs all sorts of experiences for web, mobile, and wearable products. She has worked at companies like NVIDIA, eBay, and, most recently, Google, where she helped launch Android Wear 2.0 and now works on new opportunities for Google Photos. Krystal rounds out her design work with watercolour painting and scuba diving.
Onboarding for the long run
It’s tempting to create one-size-fits-all onboarding experiences, constrained to a new user’s first day with your product, but onboarding can serve a much broader purpose. Products are constantly evolving. People are constantly learning. And everyone learns at different speeds. In this session, Krystal will share how good new-user experiences can be effective throughout the entire customer journey. You’ll see why it’s important to design guidance that addresses a range of product and user situations, and how onboarding makes sense as part of a longer-term approach to in-product education.
Creating a user onboarding compass
We work hard to earn new users. When they come to our digital experiences, we want them to have a great first impression...and we want them to stick around! That’s where user onboarding comes in. Effective onboarding guides new folks from first time use to long term commitment at a meaningful pace.
This workshop will give you practical strategies for designing onboarding that provides value beyond the first run. We’ll focus on how to build it as a compass for guiding users in different situations to the same destination, instead of as a rigid, disjoint, and hard to maintain flow. Through a series of fun exercises, you’ll learn how to:
- Identify key actions across the customer journey that onboarding can support
- Break down key actions into modules and scaffold them with guidance
- Develop a toolkit of diverse onboarding techniques that fit your product and users
- Apply select educational principles to onboarding
This workshop is perfect for beginning to intermediate designers who are just getting started on onboarding design, those currently redesigning an onboarding experience, or simply those interested in building better in-product education. Just so you know we won't be covering how to evaluate onboarding experiences or measure success metrics like retention or engagement.