Design, build & launch of a benefit platform onboarding portal

Decent's onboarding process is lengthy. As a PEO (Professional Employer Organization), Decent must handle Human Resources, Benefits, Payroll, and Worker's Compensation for all employers (and their employees). For our customers' benefits to begin on time, Decent must promptly collect and process a massive amount of data from our employer customers. (read: over 250 values, not including employee data).

Decent initially launched the PEO by onboarding employers via an Excel spreadsheet. However, the spreadsheet offered our team no way to normalize and validate data. It was also lengthy and daunting, and there was no way to hide fields that did not apply to our customers. Our customers endured an arduous and confusing onboarding experience that required lots of hand-holding from our Implementation team.

Further, values from the spreadsheet had to be manually translated into Salesforce by our Implementation team (our team uses Salesforce as our 'hub' of truth for employer and employee data). The number of fields added over an hour of work per implementation for each sale. We also risked problems due to human error from this tedious input translation exercise.

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Requirements Gathering & Rapid Research

Duration: 1 week

My role

• Product Manager

Phase summary

I kicked this project off with a looming bulk of new companies to onboard. I had five weeks to build a codified onboarding experience, lest our existing spreadsheet onboarding experience would overwhelm our Implementation team. Thus, we needed to identify and begin implementing a solution quickly. Because I didn't have time to do an extensive research push to kick off the project, I knew that an easily iterable solution would be necessary to our team. Other requirements for this project were authentication, HIPAA compliance, and direct integration with Salesforce.

To get the most out of my rapid research session, I took a few approaches:

• Expert interviews: I conducted brief interviews with internal SMEs and Onboarding Specialists, and pre-existing HR professional and small business employer relationships.
• Card sorting exercise: I recruited HR professionals and small business employers for a card sorting exercise. The output of this exercise was intuitive groupings and group names for our onboarding questions.
• Tooling audit: I reviewed which form-building and portal tools would best help our team achieve our goals.

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After researching tooling solutions, I proposed using Salesforce Communities, a native Salesforce product, to host the Portal. Since the product was native to our existing suite of tools, this solution allowed us to bypass the time required to sign contracts and get legal approval. It was also a HIPAA-compliant solution and had direct integration with Salesforce. At the time, our team was short on developers, so I opted to build out the fields using FormAssembly, a third-party service, rather than propose custom Salesforce Development. This way, non-technical people on the Decent team could own/implement changes to the Onboarding portal without help from developers.

From there, I scoped work for our Salesforce Administrator to build out all of the fields we needed to collect inside Salesforce. Creating these fields gave our Onboarding Portal endpoints to 'speak' to.

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Design & Implementation

Duration: 4 weeks

My roles

• Product Manager
• Lead Designer
• Salesforce Administrator

Phase summary

Armed with research and a tooling plan in place, I began rapidly iterating on an MVP experience for our Onboarding portal. Our MVP prioritized setting clear expectations, intuitive question groupings, and reducing friction through data validation and conditional question logic based on feedback.

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Other high-value attributes surfaced during user research, like education, UI animations, and a final review screen were relegated for future iterations on the product.

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See the MVP prototype here! (Note:this prototype contains placeholder illustrations & icons ✨)

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Finally, I built out the Portal: I spun up a Salesforce Community and built out the scoped experience within FormAssembly. I created over 250 fields with validation criteria and conditional logic, and I wrote over 950 lines of CSS to improve the User Experience and add Decent's branding to the Portal. I also drafted communications for Portal emails, and I wrote/recorded extensive training materials for our Implementation team to familiarize themselves with how the Portal worked.

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The Portal launched in time to support Decent's big sales push. The Onboarding Portal reduced the time for employers to onboard from an average of four days to 30 minutes. Our Implementation team saves over an hour per employer due to the Portal's direct integration with Salesforce. They also save time previously spent verifying values (data validation & normalization) and clarifying terms (we can now quickly iterate and update copy within the Portal to clarify common questions).

Looking forward

The Portal delivered a massive immediate value to our team and was conceived of and delivered in under five weeks. It was a significant win for our teams 🎉

Still, the Portal certainly has areas for improvement. Because we're using FormAssembly, our ability to customize the experience is limited. We also have a brittle release process via the Salesforce Community and FormAssembly, so iterations on the product are not as reliable as in a custom development environment. 

I will begin user testing on the Portal in 2022 to build out a strong roadmap for the future of the product. There's more to come! 

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Top-of-mind ideas to test, research, and validate in 2022 ✌️

• How might we embed educational content to clarify terms and contextualize questions?
• How might we utilize illustrations and animations to reduce friction and create a more enjoyable onboarding experience?
• How might we ensure that we only ask the questions we need from employers, regardless of their benefits policies, PTO policies, company makeup, state requirements, etc.?
• How might we sync employers' existing payroll and HRIS systems to pull all their relevant data into our systems automatically?