Deputy’s ingenious offer to new users

Ever feel like you need a giant, color-coded spreadsheet when it comes to scheduling employees for shifts? As scheduling managers can attest (and any parents with kids in extracurriculars), scheduling can be hard to sort out. Fortunately, Deputy makes it easy to create schedules and track time.

Within their onboarding experience, Deputy asks some quick questions. First, they inquire about the user’s primary use case: scheduling, tracking hours, or processing payment? Once the user responds to “What brings you to Deputy?” an additional question pops up. This declared data can benefit Deputy in a lot of ways—from product messaging to planning for future features.

Deputy also collects the user’s phone number during onboarding, and while this may seem like an “ugh, someone’s going to try to sell me something” moment, Deputy instead immediately texts a helpful link to download its app.

Whether the user finishes onboarding on the web or in the mobile app, a checklist shows what items still need to be completed. Not only that, but Deputy awards users with more time in their free trial for every checklist item they complete. Talk about motivation!

What makes this really good UX:

• Deputy’s onboarding checklist clearly shows the number of tasks involved and also implies the amount of effort required by rewarding more significant tasks with more time in the free trial (Set up basic scheduling rules = 1 day; Add your team members = 3 days).
• The text invitation to download either the iPhone or Android app also includes a brief message that reminds users of Deputy’s features (see schedules, clock on/off, etc.) juuuust in case the user doesn’t take immediate action and has to come back to the text message later.
• By collecting information about the user’s use case upfront, Deputy can provide a more personalized onboarding experience. Understanding how users are currently managing scheduling (like in an Excel sheet) also gives Deputy valuable insights for product messaging (e.g. are they competing with a homegrown method or another tool?).