Thumbtack: New Pro Onboarding

User personas

Part of updating our offering meant defining what we meant internally by a “larger business.” I worked with our product manager and senior leadership to create a set of pro personas. These personas have since been used on multiple projects to help us identify the audience for a particular new product.

We didn’t want to leave our “simply starters” and “cautious curators” behind. But we initially determined that the improvements to onboarding would focus on our “grow getters” and “established expanders.”

The hope was that these improvements would attract more of the grow getters & established expanders. Thumbtack was among the lowest-used by these pros, compared to competitors.

Content goals

Our pro onboarding flow was a maze.

Since we were redesigning the flow anyways, I audited the flow and content and took a hard look at where we could reduce friction and dropoff. I set out to simplify, consolidate, and make the point of each step in the onboarding journey more transparent.

Audit / site map

Navigating the pro app’s current onboarding flow meant completing up to 26 (!!) different steps.

Initial proposal

I proposed 3 different ways to improve the onboarding design & content.

Option 1: “Kill our darlings”

I analyzed the onboarding flow, and found screens that were excessive and removable, or could be rolled up into other stages of the flow.

Option 2: Merge if / when we can’t cut

If removing screens felt too aggressive for product teams, I also pointed out key spots where two or three screens could roll up into one.

As an example, I looked at this piece of onboarding:

Option 3: Reveal the maze

A third lower-lift option would be to maintain the flow at the same overall size, but add progress indicators, and make some steps skippable (i.e. either optional, or something the pro can fill out later after they finish onboarding).

From a content optimization perspective, using all 3 options at once was most ideal. But an “and/or” approach offered the team sizing options.

While auditing the flow and suggesting these improvements, I took the opportunity to also lay down a set of content design principles, to use for all onboarding work going forward.

Principle #1: Keep it lean

Time is money, and large businesses are bottom-line focused. Our onboarding should be a breeze to navigate, and never overwhelm the pro. Pros should be steered on a path that gets them into the product as quickly as possible. 

Principle #2: Tailor to a narrow audience

We want to build an onboarding journey that maps to a specific pro - the committed, larger business - and focus on aspects of account setup that map to their specific goals (i.e. setting ambitious and flexible budgets, outbidding against other pros for leads, importing reviews from other sites). 

Principle #3: State the value

Committed pros want to know from the moment they come in to the pro app: what is unique about Thumbtack? What value do we offer against anyone they perceive as a competitor? How are we different? We want to give them something to look forward to as they onboard, and say what’s exciting about the Thumbtack pro experience throughout our signup process.

Research

While auditing the product and noting some initial solutions, principles, and constraints, I also participated in a research study. We sat with leaders of a small group of medium-to-large businesses - mostly house cleaning, landscaping, and moving companies local to the Bay Area. We had them work through our baseline onboarding flow, whether they’d signed up previously for Thumbtack or not. We also asked them questions about what they’d like and expect to see on the front cover of our product. This research heavily informed the content.

Value propositions

Combining everything I knew about our large pros to-date, including the research study, I suggested a refresh to our positioning - the narrative we used to talk about what Thumbtack offers pros.

While these value propositions were intended primarily for use with onboarding, they became an ongoing source for how we socialize our product with both new and established pros, in marketing and help content as well as other parts of the pro app.

Initial A/B test

With content principles in place, and a fresh pro narrative that skewed heavily in the direction of attracting larger businesses, I wrote two new versions of our landing page at thumbtack.com/pro. This landing page serves as the gateway in to the Thumbtack pro experience; our advertising often points to it as the first step towards joining Thumbtack as a pro.

The team started with a short A/B test, which ran concurrently with our continuing design and content work on the large pro onboarding experience. Versions A & B sat on different local markets for a short period. We also showed both versions to our pro advisory board, a select group of high-performing Thumbtack pros who sporadically helped us to understand how to better optimize our product.

Both versions of the page tested reasonably well with larger businesses. The version shown below, emphasizing integrations with customer relationship management tools (CRMs), did slightly better.

Pros on our advisory board felt that the landing page was generally compelling, but wasn’t doing a lot to make it clear how Thumbtack was actually different from other competitors. So I added in a comparison chart midway through the test. But I had to limit how much I could legally reference other competitors directly (i.e. Angi, Google, Yelp). Our legal team felt it was problematic to talk about the services other companies did and didn’t offer - what if those services changed over time? Would we keep up with every nuance?

Pivot

While the landing page test did well enough, it didn’t assuage a growing fear that attracting large businesses would be too difficult without a fundamentally different product. Senior leadership felt our “eyes were too big” targeting just big companies.

Rather than invest in expensive new infrastructure to develop that future large pro product state, it was decided to pivot to a slightly different audience. Instead of attracting large pros, we would try to attract what we referred to as “ideal pros,” and anchor on the idea of “growing” a pro’s quality on the platform.

I worked with our product manager and other leaders in the business to help define what an ideal pro meant to Thumbtack. Broadly, an ideal pro would mean any pro that could meet a homeowner’s needs, whatever the project, whenever they needed it, at the highest quality. This wouldn’t require that the pro be operating a traditionally large business, but it did mean they should have, or be rapidly working towards, a depth and breadth of service and expertise, a high degree of availability, and satisfaction from past customers.

Content strategy

Leadership looked to the team building out the new onboarding experience (us) to set a comprehensive ideal pro strategy. The content designer (me) was best positioned to provide it.

What was included in my strategy doc:

• A problem, opportunity, and vision statement (an executive summary);

• A full definition of the term “ideal pro,” what it means to be “ideal” and how pros can attain it;

• Voice & tone considerations and an ideal pro style guide;

• A complete set of value props; and

• Terminology adjustments based on the ideal pro audience.

Final content

Ultimately, I set out to do 4 things with the final concepts:

#1) I simplified.

#2) I showed progress.

#3) I showed value.

4) I updated voice & tone.

This accounted for everything except for the concept of “upleveling” pros and making pros “ideal.” It became clear during the content design process that this was difficult to establish in the context of onboarding. Trying to get pros to uplevel when they hadn’t even joined the platform yet didn’t make much sense.

So, I pushed for immediate follow-up educational moments sprinkled into the product. Newer pros would see modules designed to help them begin the upleveling process as they used the product for the first few times. I code-named these moments the new pro “butler.”

Links within the pro’s butler went to short videos showing how to finish a specific task that would help their business grow and succeed and make them better partners for their customers. I got to write scripts for these videos. I volunteered to record the audio in my home recording studio too, but alas, the company were sticklers about using an outside agency. Maybe next time :)

Links to videos:

• Making your profile stand out

• Getting good search results

• Importance of responding quickly

• Setting a smart budget

• Getting direct help from Thumbtack

Attraction of net new ideal pros (#) was neutral, even with supporting comms and other marketing.

Click-through rates on the new pro “butler” guide were high; but adoption of related features from new pros only went up a small amount. We didn’t know how many new pros would uplevel over time yet.

Next steps

• Actually build smarter integrations - more service options, more back-end support

• Incentivize new pros to uplevel, with free leads and other perks

• Reward pros who take the steps we wanted them to take; promote them higher in customer search results

• Look at putting videos, or links to videos, from the new pro butler into onboarding, even if this might make onboarding more ‘packed’ and screen-heavy (the pendulum swing back and forth between comprehensive and thorough vs lean and efficient)