Yammer’s Onboarding Experience
As of November 2020, Yammer had 17.8 million monthly active users, and around 1.4 million new users a month. However, we only saw monthly active users growing by 4.8%, which translated to just a 45% new user retention rate.
I believe the problem begins with the user’s first interaction with Yammer. For users coming into the new redesigned experience, they’re introduced to Yammer’s new features right off the bat. Users are encouraged to favorite communities, filter conversations, explore the integrated tool bar, and then drop right into the home page.
Our goal is to introduce users to Yammer so that they come back again.
Yammer Goals
How do we show the right content to get new users engaged?
How can we quickly get new users to understand our value?
As we lean into integrations with other Microsoft O365 products, how can we
better introduce new users entering from these surfaces to Yammer?
Administrator Goals
How do I get users to understand how to use Yammer? (understanding Yammer features)
How do I get users to understand when to use Yammer? (understanding Yammer conceptually)
How do I get users set up for success on Yammer?
User Goals
What is Yammer? (understanding Yammer features)
Of all my work tools, what would I use Yammer for? (understanding Yammer conceptually)
What do I do to get the most value out of Yammer?
U S E R T Y P E S
Mobile Users
Making the problem real & relevant through
research, data, or customer insights.
We looked at how other competitors onboard new users, how Yammer previously
onboarded new users, and characteristics of current retained new Yammer users.
Key Takeaways from onboarding flows for Quora, Pinterest,
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Workplace, and LinkedIn:
For those that show feeds, picking a topic or interest was blocker. Usually 3-5 selections required to proceed
It was common to be unable to skip a step until certain actions were taken.
Educate as to what affects a user action has (following someone shows their tweets in your feed)
6 out of 7 did not allow users to see the product until they engaged with the onboarding flow .
Step count ranged from 1 to 8. The average was 3-4 steps
Live Events: experience & scale
Scale implications (the live event feed is sensitive to additional features such as filters, new UI elements, etc. This also impacts our QoS when certain signals run through our backend)
Design implications (the live event feed is undergoing a design change in FY20. This means the feed will look and behave differently than a regular community feed)
UX (the live event experience is not entirely the same as the community feed experience. The use cases are different, please make sure the ping the LE team to have them aware of any changes)
First-time User Experience
For users that have not experienced the previous Yammer design
Who is a new user?
A new Yammer user is someone who has never been on Yammer, or hasn't logged in over a year
New users are considered new for 28 days.
We will provide the option to dismiss the onboarding modules after 1 month
We want to encourage new users to...
Where do we put it?
Returning Users
Results
With the unprecedented increase in new users during these remote times, this redesigned onboarding experience accelerated our monthly active user growth to 30 million.
With this influx of new users, monthly active users have been growing 9% every month.