Onboarding Bot
DevLaunchers
UX Research | UX Writing | GPT Chatbots
Project currently in development
User Research through stakeholder interviews
Analysis of research - FigJam, Interview coding
UI Design for mockups - 3 design variants created through the DevLaunchers Design System
Graphic Designing for specific design artifacts
1 Project Manager, 1 UX Researcher, 2 AI Engineers & 1 Front End Developer
July 2023 - Present
DevLaunchers is a non-profit organization created to support individual tech journeys by providing hands-on experience and expertise. It mainly builds open source software projects led by professionals in various domains. As the organization continues to grow, there is a need for streamlined operations within the community.
The bot will initiate first contact with the new members to welcome them and get started at the organization.
The chatbot will ensure consistent onboarding flow across the organization ensuring all required information is relayed in its entirety.
The bot will act as a one stop solution to provide access to organization documentation.
The bot will collate the contact database of the organization and provide the correct point of contact for new and old members looking to connect with individuals within the organization.
The design of the bot was tested several times through internal feedback loops and organization wide surveys. The UI of the bot was verified and validated by different design teams within the organization to ensure seamless integration across the organization and adherence to the design system.
DevLaunchers is a vast organization with different verticals. Being a remote first, volunteer organization, there are a lot of areas which can benefit from an automated AI solution. This project started with the brief of exploring GPT based solutions which can help streamline operations in the long term.
First round of broad research involved interviewing key community members to gain a high level understanding of the problems being faced in the day to day operations.
These interviews not only contributed several key ideas to our initial brainstorming sessions but also gave an insight into the inner workings of the community.
I identified the target audience for each solution and worked out the impact that each would have on the organization as a whole. This gave me an idea of what the team could potentially work on.
The operations team at Devlaunchers helped sketch out a rough workflow for their current onboarding process. An important discovery was that the workflow was only a rough guideline on how members at Devlaunchers would be onboarded, individual experiences would vary based on the team and team lead.
I interviewed new members at Devlaunchers to understand their experiences with the onboarding process. The key aim was to understand the timeline of onboarding and their opinions on how a chatbot could help improve or streamline their experience. At the end of each interview, the participants were also asked to rate their experience out of 5.
Based on interviews conducted with new members, the onboarding experience was rating 3/5. This is not a terrible rating and meant that the current onboarding process was working fine.
Co-founders Kris and Chung are usually the first contact for new members. Being an open volunteer organization, having 2 people reach out to all incoming members creates a bottleneck.
Despite a common workflow of onboarding, each team member has a slightly different onboarding experience. This is because each team leader has their own way of integrating new members.
Members at Devlaunchers are often also handling a second commitment alongside working at Devlaunchers. As a result, there can be a lot that slips through the gaps when transferring information to new joinees.
Since the primary method of communication is Discord, there is no way to find out the designation of members. Hence when there is a need to find a point of contact for a certain team, new volunteers can face problems.
I tried to visualize what a new onboarding workflow could look like with the bot being used to welcome new members to volunteers. The initial workflow raised several key questions:
Mid fidelity designs were created to gain feedback on the workflow and to try and answer the questions raised.
Click Here to view Figma fileThe team internally finalized the full screen chabot to go ahead as there is potential to expand the bot from onboarding to complete operations assistance in the future. Based on this, the full screen chatbot was finalized to maintain ease of use and consistency for future versions.
Three different mid-fidelity UI versions were created and the community voted for the final layout via Discord.
The final layout was integratred with the new User Profile designs to create the final look of the chatbot.
The side panel for navigation was decided as the primary access point for the bot.
The project is currently in the development stage with final designs for the first iteration being handed over.
On the design front, the team is exploring different graphics and iconography to better represent the idea of the bot and the personality of the DevLaunchers organization.
Checking out the Figma file link will enable you to view the latest on the UI front and see additional screens, edge cases, newer graphics etc which will be integrated with the new DevLaunchers website.
