Rous | UI UX Designer

Resume

Maxlence

Onboarding Experience

Design

Figma

Onboarding Experience

Design

Figma

Role

IC UX UI Designer

Product Designer +

AI-Assisted Builder

Team

1 Designer,

1 Developer

Duration

15 Days

Company

Maxlence Consulting

Problem

Companies with multiple employee roles often require users to answer many onboarding questions before accessing their dashboard. Most onboarding experiences become overwhelming because users are forced to go through long forms, unclear steps, and irrelevant options before they can actually start using the platform. This creates confusion, low completion rates, and poor first impressions.

Before

Since this was a fresh product, there was no existing onboarding experience or design system in place. I had to design the onboarding flow completely from scratch while defining how users would first interact with the platform. The challenge was creating a flow that could handle different user roles without making the experience feel overwhelming or complicated from the beginning.

What I Did

I designed and built the onboarding experience for the intranet platform completely from scratch with the goal of helping users reach a personalized dashboard faster and with less friction. Since the platform served employees, HR teams, managers, and SaaS users, the onboarding needed to adapt to different workflows while still feeling simple and guided.

I focused on reducing cognitive overload by restructuring the onboarding into smaller, progressive steps instead of one long form. I used conditional logic to only show relevant questions based on user choices and added clear progress indicators to make the experience feel manageable.

Designed the onboarding architecture from scratch
Created step-by-step onboarding flow to reduce overwhelm
Grouped related questions into smaller sections
Used conditional logic to personalize onboarding paths
Added progress indicators to improve flow clarity
Structured onboarding around dashboard customization goals
Optimized layouts for better mobile responsiveness
Simplified question hierarchy and interaction patterns

After

The result was the first structured onboarding experience for the platform, designed to guide users step-by-step toward a personalized dashboard. Instead of presenting everything at once, the flow introduced information progressively through grouped questions, conditional logic, and clearer navigation patterns.

The onboarding structure also created a scalable foundation that could later adapt to different user roles, workflows, and future platform features.

Business Value

The project demonstrated how a structured onboarding experience can reduce friction and improve first-time user experience in enterprise and SaaS platforms. By simplifying the onboarding flow, the platform could guide users toward dashboard personalization faster while making the system feel more approachable.

Mistake

One of the biggest challenges was that the final product scope was still evolving while I was designing the onboarding flow. I initially included onboarding options for features that were planned but not yet ready for this phase of the product.

As the project evolved, some features were removed or postponed, which meant I had to revisit and simplify parts of the onboarding experience later. This taught me the importance of validating onboarding content against the confirmed MVP scope before scaling the experience further.

I also learned that in early-stage products, onboarding can quickly become too ambitious if future functionality is assumed too early in the design process.

Learning

This project taught me that onboarding is less about collecting information and more about helping users build confidence while moving through the system. I learned how important it is to reduce cognitive load by controlling how much information users see at once.

Since this was built from scratch, I also learned how onboarding decisions directly shape the overall perception of a platform. Small structural choices like question grouping, step sequencing, and conditional visibility had a major impact on clarity and completion flow.

I also understood that onboarding should always align with the actual product scope and implementation roadmap, especially in evolving SaaS products.

Future State

The onboarding system was designed with scalability in mind so additional workflows, user roles, and dashboard modules can be integrated over time without redesigning the full experience. The conditional onboarding structure also allows the platform to evolve into a more adaptive and personalized system in future iterations.

Detailed plan

Maxlence Consulting

This solution provides HR professionals with a seamless onboarding experience, enabling them to input their details easily and get started. Once onboarded, HRs gain access to a comprehensive custom dashboard, offering intuitive tools to manage tasks, streamline workflows, and optimize HR operations effortlessly.

Introduction

Maxlence intranet is a platform from where user will reach to their designated dashboard

When designing SaaS products, it is important to have a platform through which users can be onboarded and routed to their dashboard.

The evolution of Maxlence Intranet

The Challenge

My goal for this project was to provide the best user experience during onboarding to the platform, reduce onboarding time, and make it enjoyable.

Goals

Improve user engagement

Make sure that users get to dashboard

Users can customize their dashboard.

My Role

Between January and February 2021, I led the design of the Maxlence intranet On-boarding experience. During this time, I collaborated with dev team, which consisted of two React developers.

I was the IC designer responsible for the design. I conducted research, planned the project, and executed it.

Design Process

Empathy

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Picking up the
Pieces

When I received this design requirement, I had a clear mission and specific goals in mind for Intranet. As it has to be a role-based experience, I was sure about which section needs to be hidden or shown for better user engagement and experience.

In the initial stakeholders meeting, they only talked about the intranet we need. How? When? Why? Nothing. I was responsible for all.

Early Research

I began my early research by examining the competitive products in the market to see their approach for the onboarding experience. My goal for this study was simple: to gather data from various sources for my lightning demo so that I could come up with a better experience for our product.

Following this, I held a brainstorming session. During this exercise, I focused on three major platforms, namely BambooHR, KEKA, and Zendesk, which are MaxHR's primary competitors in the market.

BambooHR

Zendesk

Pain Points

These are pain points mentioned by user during user interviews.

HRs are using more than one software to bridge the gap between their requirements.

Users are frustrated to fill a long list while onboarding, and at the end when they land, it does not fulfill the purpose, thus repeating the same process again.

They want a click-based interface rather than writing in an input box.

User wanted to have custom experience when they land on dashboard

HRs want the experience to just work with minimal effort.

During user interviews, HRs often mention competitive software names for the betterment of the product, ex. BambooHR, Keka, and Zendesk.

Research Execution

While the product was still in the design phase, I had to choose the most efficient method in UX to gather insights from the HRs. During this phase, time constraints for designing the intranet page did not allow me to follow all UX methods.

So I chose user interviews to gather more data on it. Below is the script I prepared for doctor interviews in Figma.

User interview script

Hello, Sir/Ma'am. Good morning. How are you feeling today? My name is Roushan, and I am a UX designer at Maxlence Consulting. I am conducting this interview to gain real insights from HR professionals about their onboarding experience. Specifically, I am interested in how your HR team onboards new employees at your organization and how you yourselves use HR tools for day-to-day activities. I want to understand what can improve your onboarding experience. I would like to learn more about this in order to create something that makes our end users' lives easier, so please educate me further on this topic.

How do you integrate new tools with your existing HR systems?

2. How do you currently onboard new tools or software into your HR workflow?

3. What are the biggest challenges you face when implementing new software for HR activities?

4. What features or capabilities are essential for you when onboarding to a new SaaS tool?

5. To what extent do you need to customize the tool to fit your specific HR processes?

6. What features or improvements would make the onboarding process easier for you?

This is the script that I wrote to do HRs interviews. Along the way, I made some changes in the script.

Challenge

Doing online research is much easier than I thought, but I never take HRs' interviews, so I was a bit nervous, but as soon as I was ready for that, I hit the real challenge to get HRs onboard for user interviews. My first assumption was I would get HRs from the office.

It was equally difficult for me to get HRs for interviews. Most of them reject the proposal by saying "busy." I try to keep myself motivated by saying I will get HR for the interview and keep patient.

At the end I got time from my company HRs for my interview process; it took me almost 5 days to get confirmation from 3 HRs for the interview, and some of them I got from my ex-company.

User Interviews

At first glance my assumption about HR's interview was very simple, like any other interview, but I forgot that there is a difference between a normal user and a specialized user (while my user is a specialized one).

In this Phase I was open for interviews 24/7. In the day because I have to be available at their time; even some of the interviews I did were at late night, 10 PM.

As I started with the interview process, I often got suggestions from the HRs for my product, which was not something I was looking for because my questions were aligned to understand the HRs' process and build something that was actually helpful in their day-to-day life.

Assumptions

After I did all HRs' interviews in 20 days, the process of listening to the recordings started. I also made some notes along the way, which were scattered in my notebook.

I started listening to all those recordings again carefully and wrote down all the major takeaways from them. Most of the time communication follows a different path altogether where I have to take control and align with my questions, which leads to HRs frustration sometimes, and they get irritated because I keep asking the same and similar questions, but I have to be with them, so they should talk about their process.

User Interview Findings

Before it all happened, my ultimate goal was to find patterns and cluster them into themes; simply put, I did thematic analysis.

In my analysis I find out that most of the HRs are complaining about filling out multiple forms. which I already know, but they thought about me doing product reviews, so they came up with suggestions based on other competitors' products.

So the themes that I made are based on what area of the product we are talking about.

Recommendation

Performance

Easy to Use

Findings

Basic functionality that should be available for onboarding was missing, for example, templates, suggestions, autocomplete, and skip.

No customization according to HR's team size.

Almost everything the user has to fill out is from scratch.

On-boarding was lacking for specific things like skip, a user-friendly option to choose from, to much scrolling, and missing reference pointers, etc.

Early Wireframes

Based on the research data, I started sketching ideas for the intranet. Some of my early sketches are based on the available Intraday design, but later on I realized that if I want to add more features and options into it, I need to use a large area for Intraday onboarding because at that time I did an intranet center popup, which was not enough to cover more features.

In this whole project I used Figma as the primary design tool, which is also a standard tool for designers.

And finally made some iteration and came to this revision and settled on this.

Features Introduce

In this revision, I have added a new feature to the onboarding that benefits different types of team sizes. These features can now customize the onboarding experience.

Work type

Current role

Team size

Company size

Types of work

Field of work

Reach

Invite members

Visual Design

The design language for the product has already been set, so I will not discuss it in depth here. However, I can share some basic information.

Next Project

Roushani

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