PlusPal
A seamless onboarding experience for incoming tutors, a conversational user interface workflow built on Intercom.
PLUS Users
500+
Engagement
Rate
Rate
89.6%
Company
Personalized Learning Squared: PLUS
my role
Product Designer
timeline
4 months, Fall 2024
team
1 Designer (Me), 1 Manager
the company
What is PLUS?
An online tutoring platform that pairs skilled human tutors with AI-driven tools to help middle school students from underserved communities excel in math.
3000+
Students
500+
Tutors
10K+
Hours per Month
problem
Repetitive communication work between stakeholders
If you are a supervisor in PLUS, those are the tools you have to use when recruiting, onboarding, or training new tutors.
The company lacks an efficient communication channel between individual tutors and supervisors, especially for the onboarding period.
How might we streamline communication across multiple platforms and reduce repetitive tasks?
Solution
Automate the onboarding workflow with an AI-facilitated chatbot
We upgraded the service system with a chatbot that provides a smooth onboarding flow, and largely reduced the manual work of supervisors.
Feel free to play with the chatbot on PLUS website ↓↓↓
Discover
Digging in to the communication pattern between stakeholder groups
Uncover the problem from three aspects: users, tasks, and tools.
The Users
Understand responsibilities and goals of three stakeholders
Supervisor - Erin
Recruit new members & Manage tutor team
Tutor Lead - Allison
Host sessions & Monitor students’ progress
Individual Tutor - Sandy
Solve students’ problems & Collaborate with the team
The Tasks
Learn about tasks they are going through in their daily lives.
The Tools
Collect the tools they are using to finish their daily tasks.
Define
What are the top problems Supervisors are facing?
Gathering all issues they have.
We held two ideation workshops to identify and organize the issues supervisors face in their daily workflow. We uncovered over 20 scattered and messy problems. To prioritize, we then conducted a validation session with supervisors.
Voting to identify the most pressing issues.
To validate and prioritize the issues, we presented our findings to the supervisors and gathered their votes on the severity of each problem.
Issue #1: Manually Sent Repeated Message
Supervisors spend too much time sending the same messages repeatedly.
Issue #2: Repetitive File Sharing
Supervisors are constantly sending repetitive files to tutors such as FAQ or guidance files.
Issue #3: Scattered Data and Platforms
Supervisors have to help tutors go through multiple digital platforms to complete the onboarding process.
ideation
Deciding on explore automation tools for future communication
We held an ideation session together with three supervisors to brainstorm ideas to eliminate redundant communication between stakeholders. We have two options for the design direction of the final product.
Direction 1: Stick to the existing tools
Reorganize the Slack channels to fix the issues.
Reorganize the Slack channels to fix the issues.
Direction 2: Explore automation tools
Automate the onboarding workflow and eliminate most communication work.
Automate the onboarding workflow and eliminate most communication work.
We picked this direction in the end to explore more opportunities with other PLUS functions.
prototype
Map out the onboarding workflow with target users
Co-Created the workflow together with the target users.
We invited 4 supervisors to a co-creation workshop for a standardized onboarding workflow and accurate files and access throughout the process. During the session, they revised the messages we created and corrected the overall workflow.
Standardize workflow of the chatbot
Then, we mapped out the onboarding workflow based on the co-creation results, which serves as the basic logics of how the chatbot works.
Recruitment Phase
Clearance Phase
Training Phase
Access Phase
Iteration
user Test: We should make More Engaging and error-prone conversations
❓ Type: Walk through & interview
📍 Location: On Zoom
🧑 Participants: 5
⏱️ Length: About 30 minutes
Insight 1: Short paragraphs make engagement
In the user test, we found that the information in one bulk message usually overwhelm the users. So we cut the bulk messages into lighter ones no longer than 2 sentences each.
Insight 2: Side track for human support
At the start, we transfer the user problems directly to human support by recording their problems and email address. However, some user questions are frequent. So we added one step of FAQ support before human support to further lighten the workload of supervisors.
Insight 3: Handle the errors
We found 2 out of 5 users reported an issue that they cannot go back to re-choose the phases during the conversation. So we added a path choosing touch-point at certain steps, PlusPal will go directly to the corresponding step after identifying the keyword.
Final Solution
An Automated Onboarding assistant chatbot
Customized Welcome Flow for multi types of users
This feature displays a list of tutors to users, allowing them to search by tutor ID. This functionality helps users quickly identify underperforming tutors by directly accessing their profiles.
Integrated onboarding steps
The chatbot streamlines the whole workflow of the onboarding process as an incoming tutor, including application form, clearance, training, and getting access.
Human-facilitated problem-solving process
If the provided AI assistant and FAQ files cannot answer users’ questions, PlusPal will transfer the questions to the human support team.
future steps
Expand the automation update across all steps in the service blueprint.
Build customized automation for the lead tutors and supervisors as well.
Connect to all tools the stakeholders are using, including Google workspace, Zoom, and Box.