increasing Flexibility with placeholders 🧘

Defining the problem

To better understand the template engagement problem, I turned to quantitative analysis of usage data. I learned that more customers were clicking on templates than ever before—suggesting the new use-cases were resonating—but the overall conversion rate from users clicking a template to turning that template on had decreased from 44% (legacy templates) to 13% (new templates). Yikes! Digging further, I found a whopping 65% of customers were abandoning or canceling from the guided setup without ever getting to see their selected template, many from the very first step.

Template users weren’t the only customers suffering from strict setup requirements. The root problem of requiring assets (like emails and forms) to build a workflow led to:

• Manual work: Customers manually mapped flows with pen and paper to determine what content they’d need to set up their workflow, making it harder to visualize their framework and collaborate with teammates

• Hard to scale: Customers were unable to build and repurpose their own blank templates specific to their business processes

• Time wasted: Customers hit a barrier when adding actions they hadn’t yet built assets for, causing them to abandon setup and start over at a later date, wasting time and increasing the likelihood of errors

• Decision fatigue: The setup wizard required users to make a number of decisions without any context—they didn’t know how their input related to their workflow and there was no way to bypass or skip setup

Devising a Solution

Brainstorming with product and engineering, we determined “placeholder actions” would allow users to save an action without setting up any required fields. This would provide flexibility for ALL workflow customers, enabling them to build out their workflow framework and configure actions on their own timelines.

To supplement this feature, we introduced validation alerts—warnings for actions that still required configuration to turn the workflow on—and a resolution flow for those errors. I used this opportunity to audit and improve error validation messaging for consistency and clarity. And best of all, with the launch of placeholder actions, we were finally able to add the option for users to skip setup steps or even skip setup altogether within the guided setup flow.

Results & Next Steps

Since launching placeholder actions, an average of 10% of all saved actions—across ALL workflows—are now saved as placeholders. More importantly, customers now have the flexibility to build workflows in the way that works best for them. Using placeholder actions, we launched the skip setup feature in December 2021, resulting in:

• 38% of users who choose a template click either/both of the skip step and skip setup options ⏭

• Decreased setup cancellation rate from 43% to 36% 📉

• Increased rate of users reaching template builder from 31% to 56% 🎉

• Increased overall template turn-on rate from 16% to 26% 📈

These results validated our hypothesis that the setup wizard wasn’t providing value and was instead blocking users from getting to templates. But while these were positive signals, the skip options wouldn’t scale well as we grew our library of templates — we’d need to create and maintain skippable setup wizards for each template that essentially duplicated the existing configuration process within the workflow builder. 

We considered: how might we leverage placeholder actions to decrease time-to-value (TTV) and provide contextual setup guidance for new and experienced users without overwhelming them? How might we create a setup experience that scales long-term, reduces internal maintenance, and eliminates tech debt?

Solving for long-term success 🌟

Hypothesis

I hypothesized that moving the setup flow to the workflow builder would give customers necessary context to overcome the known learning curve 📖 — leading to more long-term adoption, increased turn-on rates, and decreased support calls.

Validating with users

Collaborating with my product manager and tech lead, I designed two new setup flows within the workflow builder — one with lighter guidance that would take less time to complete (Concept 1), and one with more explicit step-by-step guidance (Concept 2). Feedback from fellow product and content designers helped strengthen both concepts.

I designed a research plan and set up an unmoderated concept test in UserZoom that randomized the order in which the concepts were shown to reduce bias. I recruited 8 participants from a range of regions, age groups, and socio-economic backgrounds to ensure diverse perspectives and inclusive feedback. Key takeaways included:

• Concept 1: Quick and easy with fewer overall steps. Configuring the workflow trigger without context led to confusion and a lower perception of accuracy, similar to the existing wizard experience.

• Concept 2: Boosted confidence throughout setup through ongoing reassurance. Resulted in delight and deeper understanding of the tool for better long-term learnability.

• Overall: Users universally found their second setup experience easier than the first. Focus on creating a positive first experience and encouraging a follow-up experience to help truly overcome the learning curve.

We agreed to continue iterating on Concept 2 due to the long-term benefits and increased confidence.

final Solution

After investigating implementation, engineering surfaced technical concerns around scalability and complexity that would take a substantial amount of time to build. We brainstormed together and sought feedback from teams who owned overlapping product areas to develop a more scalable solution that still provided contextual, directional setup guidance while reducing tech debt.

Next Steps

We agreed to ship the new setup experience iteratively to move faster, mitigate risk, and learn as we go. We’ll validate these improvements with customers via an in-app survey and user interviews 🧪️

Our long-term vision is to enable customers to create and save their own templates. We’ve built the new setup guidance to support customer editing so they can write their own instructions to enable their teammates and set their clients up for success.