Redesigning the Growthspace participant onboarding experience to help employees quickly identify their development goals and connect with the right mentors.
Growthspace is a mentoring and coaching platform that helps employees develop professional skills by connecting them with relevant mentors and coaches.
Participants begin their journey by selecting the skills they want to develop. However, the onboarding experience was complex and unclear, making it difficult for participants to understand where to start.
As a result, it often took up to 8 days for participants to complete onboarding and begin their mentoring journey.
Lead Product Designer
Responsible for:
Reduce friction in the onboarding process and help participants quickly understand:
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The existing journey included multiple steps that were difficult to understand and poorly connected.
Participants had to navigate emails, PDFs and forms before they could even select a skill to develop.
"We tried to search the specific skills in the PDF with no luck"
"The email notifications are not informative enough"
"The email isn't clear that there are 3 options"
"Scheduling and rescheduling sessions is confusing"
These interviews revealed that participants struggled to understand the program and how to get started.
Participants relied on an external PDF skill table to understand available skills and competencies. The product itself did not provide enough hierarchy or explanation.
Participants described the onboarding process as complex and difficult to follow. There was no clear indication of progress or completion.
Many users ignored the invitation email because it failed to clearly explain what the program is, what value they will get, and what the next step is.
Participants selected development goals without clarity about their manager's expectations.
Participants reported difficulty understanding how to reschedule sessions.
Participants lacked clarity, guidance and confidence during onboarding.
The process required external resources, multiple steps and manual coordination.
As a result, participants needed up to 8 days to understand their development focus.
Based on research insights we defined four principles:
Provide clear hierarchy and context for skill selection.
Users should always understand where they are in the process.
Enable collaborative goal definition.
Minimize steps before the first mentoring session.
The new onboarding flow was redesigned to guide participants through a clear and structured journey. Instead of navigating multiple external resources, users now complete the entire process inside the platform.
We took the existing skills PDF and integrated it directly into the product — making the skill catalog discoverable, searchable, and contextual.
When a user selects a focus area, they immediately see the relevant skill sets available for that area — along with a clear explanation of what they can expect to gain from each one. This gave users the confidence to choose the right path from day one.
Key improvements included:
The redesigned onboarding dramatically improved activation.
Faster onboarding
Higher participant engagement
Reduced support requests
Clear alignment between participant and manager
Demonstrating the full onboarding experience.
