Onboarding Experience

Company

Yourgi, a digital marketplace web and mobile app that connects pet parents with pet service providers offering everything from daycare to grooming.

Primary Users

Independent pet care professionals, such as in-home daycare and boarding providers, who are joining the Yourgi marketplace space with established pet care businesses.

Challenge

Our core users are experts in animal care—not digital marketing. How might we support pet care professionals in communicating their expertise, preferences, and availability to potential customers through a streamlined onboarding experience that lowers barriers to entry?

Role

As a contract Product Designer, I collaborated closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and other Product Designers to define, design, and deliver a fully responsive digital marketplace experience from concept to handoff.

Goal
Design an onboarding flow that assists new users as they build professional profiles while also maintaining high completion rates.

Discovery

Early Research

Early in the project timeline, I collaborated with an external market research firm who conducted qualitative interviews with about 30 participants in the pet care industry. These interviews surfaced high-value insights into behavioral patterns, adoption likelihood, and general pain points across their workflow.

The findings informed both business strategy and UX decision-making, shaping the personas, features, and goals of the onboarding experience.

User Personas

Using research insights, I mapped pet care professionals along a digital adoption spectrum from “low interest” to “high interest.” I developed personas at each end to ensure the experience could scale across confidence levels and attempt to persuade a tech-averse pet care provider.

These personas became key tools for prioritizing features and anticipating friction points during flow design.

Audit of Direct + Indirect Competitors

I conducted an evaluation of direct and indirect competitors with a focus on onboarding features:

  • What content might crucial for a potential consumer when browsing provider profiles?
  • What user settings are mandatory upfront vs. what can be discovered later in the user journey?
  • What potential pain points are consumers encountering in their marketplace experiences?

This audit really informed our MVP scope by revealing what information builds trust and where we could differentiate.

Business Needs

The business required an onboarding process that would:

  • Confirm the user’s identity (background check)
  • Enhance the user’s qualifications
  • Reduce onboarding abandonment
User Needs

Pet care professionals need a way to efficiently communicate:

  • Services offerings, with a level of anonymity for security purposes
  • Experience and certifications
  • Care preferences (animal type, care routines)

 

Consumers (pet parents) need to select a provider based on:

  • Service compatibility
  • Availability
  • Proximity

Design

User Flow Diagramming

To answer outstanding questions around user paths, system states, and edge cases, I led discussions with stakeholders using FigJam to collaboratively map high-level user flows diagrams.

This early mapping allowed me to establish high-level goals and bring to light crucial decisions for both the product and engineering teams to help us move forward at a fast pace.

Content Structure

Using my findings from user research and competitive analysis, I developed the foundational architecture of the onboarding experience.

This included defining data fields, grouping content for an intuitive and balanced user flow, and annotating questions for additional stakeholder workshops.

Low to High-Fidelity Wireframing

Once the information architecture and user flows were ready, I transitioned into wireframing.

I structured onboarding into sectioned modules (experience, services, location, etc.) to guide users with context.

I refined typography hierarchy, navigation structure, and input components from our design system to land on an interface that users could move through with little friction.

The UI includes UX tactics such as conditional fields, links to help articles, fun visuals, and standard UI form patterns to reduce cognitive load.

Navigation

To support both guided and exploratory behaviors, the onboarding experience was designed with a multi-path navigation. Users could follow a linear, progressive flow to complete setup step by step. Alternatively, the side drawer allows users to jump between profile sections non-sequentially.

This hybrid model accommodates real-world user behavior, especially when users need time to gather assets like gathering images, refine written content like writing a bio, or complete external tasks like the background check.

Onboarding progress is saved as users completed each section, so users could pause, resume, or explore the dashboard without losing work.

Flexible User Flow

During competitive analysis, I caught a common friction point: rigid onboarding flows that trap users in mandatory linear processes, sometime with high investments such as fee payments.

To address this, I implemented flexible entry and re-entry points. Users could either begin setup immediately after creating an account or explore the platform in an empty state and return later.

This flexibility supports skeptical users evaluating the platform’s value before committing.

User Testing

After completing a mid-fidelity prototype, I partnered with our UX Researcher to validate the onboarding flow with potential users. The moderated testing focused on content clarity and feature relevance.

Participants responded positively to the granular control over profile visibility and service preferences, noting that it mirrored how they’d present themselves to clients offline.

Testing also revealed micro-interaction issues such as ambiguous confirmation states that I addressed before handoff.

Conclusion

Project Impact

This onboarding flow set the foundation for much of the platform’s architecture at large by aligning internal stakeholders on the product vision.

We were also able to reuse the UI for the standard profile setting pages, and the content greatly informed the design of the consumer-facing profile that I also designed.

User Analytics

Post-launch, the team should plan to monitor drop-off rates by onboarding stage and entry path (profile setup or dashboard exploration) as well as time to complete onboarding.

These insights will help inform iterative optimization, flag possible UX debt, and provide evidence to drive future enhancements.