Introduction: Designing an Automated Onboarding Experience for the edX Admin Portal

edX for Business partners with organizations around the world to provide impactful online learning opportunities to their employees. As part of the product team, I set out to solve a key challenge: how might we support new enterprise administrators as they navigate our platform, without requiring hands-on guidance from Sales or Support?

In this case study, I’ll walk through how I designed an automated onboarding experience that helps new customers confidently get started in the edX Admin Portal, saving time for both our users and our internal teams.

Timeline: 2 months

Role: Design lead

Company: edX for Business

Background

At edX for Business, every customer, no matter the contract size, historically went through Sales to get started. This meant our teams were investing the same onboarding effort into four-figure contracts as six-figure ones, creating a bottleneck for growth.

To improve scalability, Product aimed to reduce manual touchpoints for contracts under $15K. Meanwhile, an engineering team was building a Self-Service model to let smaller customers sign up without Sales involvement.

But that raised a critical question: once these customers signed up, how would they learn to use the admin portal on their own?

The Problem

Business:
Sales and Support were spending too much time onboarding low-value accounts, limiting their ability to focus on high-value customers.

Customer:
New customers, regardless of spend, still needed guidance to navigate the admin portal effectively.

The Goal

Create an intuitive, automated onboarding experience that empowers new customers to get started confidently, while reducing manual effort for internal teams.

Discovering the Problem Space

Customer Success Representatives (CSRs) were our closest link to the manual onboarding experience, making them key to understanding what an automated version should include.

I interviewed each enterprise CSR to learn:

• Which areas of the portal they covered in demos

• What felt intuitive or confusing to customers

• What they’d want in an automated experience

Their responses revealed clear patterns: CSRs consistently focused on the same core areas, and felt customers left demos confident, once they had that initial guidance.

Validating Research Insights

After speaking with CSRs and gathering key insights about the current onboarding process, I wanted to dig deeper. Were the areas they focused on during demos actually addressing the real pain points customers experienced?

To find out, I reviewed support tickets submitted by new customers over the past six months. I categorized each ticket as either related to onboarding or not related, looking specifically for confusion or issues tied to the admin portal.

What I found was encouraging: only about 10% of tickets from new customers were related to onboarding or portal use. This suggested that the CSRs’ demos were effectively guiding customers through the most critical parts of the experience. It also gave me a strong signal about where to focus in the automated version, replicating what was already working.

Looking for Inspiration

To spark ideas for our onboarding experience, I explored how other products, both within and outside our space, introduce users to their platforms. I looked for patterns in how they gathered user information, highlighted key features, and guided users through their product.

I drew inspiration from tools like Figma, Slack, and Asana, but focused most closely on Coursera, given its similarity to edX for Business. One common thread across all of them: some form of interactive tour. Each one used a linear tour format, requiring users to move step-by-step through the experience without skipping ahead.

While exploring Coursera’s tour, I noticed something else: it felt long. From a user perspective, I wondered how many people made it all the way through without losing focus.

This competitive analysis reinforced my initial direction—an interactive tour built with our design system’s existing components would align with familiar onboarding patterns. But it also raised a question: Could we improve on this pattern to better support our users?

Exploring Solutions

With research insights and competitive inspiration in hand, I began sketching out low-fidelity wireframes. My product partner had suggested reusing our existing product tour component to keep engineering scope manageable—but as I explored, it became clear there were areas for improvement.

One immediate issue stood out: the tour component used a row of small dots to indicate progress. On pages with 10 or more steps, this became cluttered and hard to follow—more confusing than helpful.

As I continued iterating, I realized we needed more user input to guide the design. I advocated for quick user interviews to gather feedback on onboarding experiences and reactions to early concepts; essentially a lightweight round of concept testing to validate direction and uncover new ideas.

Concept Testing

We spoke with six customers to validate our direction and uncover new insights. Alongside an interview guide, we shared early design concepts to gather feedback on the proposed onboarding experience.

A few key themes emerged:

• Time matters. Users didn’t want to spend too long on a product tour. One even cited Coursera’s tour as feeling so lengthy they gave up before finishing it.

• Step indicators fall short. As suspected, the dot-based progress indicator became confusing once there were more than four steps, users had trouble tracking their place.

• Users want control. Several participants wanted the flexibility to explore at their own pace and revisit the tour later if needed.

• Support access is key. Some users emphasized the importance of having help readily available within the portal as they explored on their own.

These insights helped shape a more flexible, user-centered onboarding flow that respects users’ time while giving them the support they need, when they need it.

Landing on a Final Solution

Concept testing made one thing clear: a linear, step-by-step tour wasn’t enough. Customers wanted flexibility, the ability to explore at their own pace, and support they could access on their terms.

With buy-in from the Product Manager, I began designing an interactive onboarding checklist. Unlike a traditional tour, this solution allowed users to move through key areas of the admin portal in any order, leave the checklist at any time, and return to it when they needed to pick up where they left off.

I updated the existing tour component to better support user needs by replacing progress dots with numbered steps for clarity and adding a close icon to give users an easy way to exit the tour at any time.

While we couldn’t include in-portal support in the initial scope, we planned for a post-MVP iteration that would enrich the checklist with contextual help—linking to relevant Help Center articles based on the user’s location in the portal. This would turn the checklist into not just an onboarding tool, but a long-term support resource.

Final prototype