Airtable’s Guided Onboarding
Manager, Stakeholder
2022
Head of Growth Design
Project info
Problem
High-effort experience
High cognitive load, especially for first-time users
Complex product
Airtable’s customers had a specific need: the effort required to build basic scaffolding was too high. They needed more support, guardrails, and bumpers to guide them through the process.
Goal
On our Activation Team, we had one North Star metric: our Team Activation Metric.
This metric represented a team of people being activated on Airtable’s product and using it in a way that suggested long-term retention.
For us, that meant: week four, multi-user.
In other words, by the fourth week, more than one person on the team is active and contributing to a workflow on Airtable.
Design Principles
Show, don’t tell
Meet our users where they are
Lean into the magic moment ✨
Moving walkway > Elevator
Solution
A guided or immersive wizard emerged as the best mechanism to reduce this effort and help customers feel more supported throughout their journey.This approach works particularly well for complex products, where determining the next steps and getting started can be challenging and cognitively demanding.
Milestone 1: Immersive Wizard, One Size Fits All
This milestone introduces a step-by-step guide that simplifies the onboarding experience. Users are prompted with clear, easy-to-answer questions, such as:
"What kind of project are you working on?"
"What kinds of things would you like to track for this project?"
As users make selections using beautiful, easy-to-click buttons that require minimal effort, a visual representation of their workflow dynamically appears on the right side of the screen. Meanwhile, the left side of the screen guides users through each step.
This approach ensures a guided, instructive, and visually engaging experience, allowing users to see their workflow come to life in real-time with minimal cognitive load.
Milestone 1.5: Immersive Wizard, Personalization
This next milestone focuses on delivering experiences that delight through efficiency and contextual suggestions—such as auto-complete and suggestion use cases informed by qualitative and quantitative research insights—while also emphasizing key opportunities to make your initial setup truly tailored to you, your team, or your entire organization.
Milestone 2: In-situ Guidance
Once your base is created, we guide you through key actions to set you and your team up for success. Our design principles—such as showing rather than telling and meeting customers where they are—inform every decision. As you interact with the left-rail modal (affectionately known as The Mole), it seamlessly guides you through valuable workflows. Along the way, actions are highlighted, and in-situ video modules provide guidance precisely when you need it.
Milestone 2.5: Everboarding and Discoverability improvements
Finally, we’ve invested in enabling teams to access onboarding actions and educational tips through an ever-present UI located in the top-right corner. This approach supports continuous, flexible learning that adapts and evolves as users' expertise in building on Airtable grows.