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Next Stage Iteration of Onboarding Flows

Created by: a-bergevin

Problem to solve

Both website visitors & new license holders on customer instances have a steep learning curve in building understanding of what Sourcegraph is, what problems it solves, and how to use it in the course of a daily workflow.

Experiments in Q1 on Sourcegraph.com (for both anonymous & logged in visitors) suggest that engagement with onboarding experiences does help drive toward activation. However, building experiences that are powerful, engaging, and will not be dismissed by most users is a significant challenge. Further experimentation on the design and content of these experiences is needed to get higher levels of engagement with the experience.

Currently onboarding experiences only exist on Sourcgraph.com and not on customer instances.

Measure of success

Success from these experiments will ideally be seen across several measures of engagement, retention & activation. Such as:

  • Reducing the one & done rate
  • 1 week retention
  • 2 week retention
  • Activation

We will work with analytics for precise definitions & ensuring tracking is in place to give us measurements / updates.

Solution summary

Impact on use cases

Onboarding will support the use cases by building an understanding for each IC in how the product can be used to solve those problems. The nature of how we build that understanding will depend on learnings from customer research as well as the assets/features built by other teams in the business that we can leverage in onboarding.

Delivery plan

  • Bring together quantitative data & customer research to map the current & optimal user journeys https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/31464
  • Early stage test - unauthenticated sourcegraph.com/search experiment with linking somehow to a search notebook to teach syntax rather than just the limited resources we know show. https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/35144
  • Generate prototypes of new user experiences for various locations in the product (logged out sourcegraph.com, logged in sourcegraph.com, customer self-hosted / mi deployents) - BLOCKED until we have design resources
  • Consider incorporating the broader goal of ongoing product education into the onboarding flow. The UI we use for onboarding sticks around as a place for ongoing release notes, etc. See issue here.