UX Research — 2025
Cadence Onboarding
A trial that people signed up for enthusiastically and then never came back to.
Seven-day activation rose from 38% to 57%.
- Client
- Cadence HR
- Discipline
- Research-led onboarding redesign
- Engagement
- 8 weeks, Apr to Jun 2025
- Team
- One product manager, two engineers
Overview
Cadence sells HR software to companies of twenty to two hundred people. Trial signups were healthy, and 62% of those accounts never performed a single meaningful action after the first session.
The company assumed the product was too complex. Eleven interviews said something more specific and much more fixable.
Role
UX researcher and designer, contract
8 weeks, Apr to Jun 2025 · One product manager, two engineers
- Eleven interviews with churned and activated trial accounts
- Journey mapping of the first seven days
- Onboarding flow redesign, including the empty and sample-data states
- Lifecycle email sequence design and copy
- Activation instrumentation defined with the product manager
Problem
The interviews turned up a consistent pattern. The people signing up were not the people who would use the product. An office manager or a founder started the trial, hit the point where real employee data was needed, and stopped, because they needed someone else to supply it.
The onboarding treated this as a single-player experience. It asked one person to complete a task that structurally required two or three, and gave them no way to hand off the part they could not do.
Process
Talking to the people who left
Eleven interviews, seven with accounts that never activated. Churned users are harder to recruit and worth several times more than happy ones. Six of the seven described the same handoff moment.
Mapping the first seven days against reality
The map made the gap obvious: the product assumed one actor, the situation had three. Every subsequent design decision came out of that single mismatch.
Designing the handoff as a feature
The trial can now be progressed collaboratively. The starter can invite a colleague to complete a specific step, see what is outstanding, and keep moving on parts they own in the meantime. Being blocked stops meaning being stuck.
Real sample data instead of an empty product
New accounts open with a realistic sample organisation they can explore and then clear in one action. People evaluate what they can see. An empty product evaluates as an empty product.
Emails that follow the actual state
The lifecycle sequence branches on what the account has and has not done, rather than on elapsed days. Someone waiting on a colleague gets a nudge to chase them, not a lecture about a feature they cannot yet reach.
Outcomes
- 57%
- Seven-day activation, up from 38%
- 2.4x
- Trials with more than one participant
- −31%
- Time to first meaningful action
- 11
- Interviews, seven with churned accounts
Multi-participant trials converted to paid at roughly twice the rate of single-participant ones, which reframed onboarding internally as a sales problem rather than a UI problem.
Gallery
Tools
- Figma
- Dovetail
- Amplitude
- Customer.io
- Notion
