The product had grown feature by feature, and its onboarding had not grown with it. A new trial user landed on a dashboard built for someone who already used the product daily: modules, filters and settings with nothing to explain what to click first. The six jobs people actually came to do were buried somewhere inside that structure, but nothing on screen pointed to them.

Because nothing surfaced value early, most trials simply ran out. Users who might have become customers spent their trial window exploring an interface built around the product's own architecture rather than around their goals, and left once the trial period ended having never reached a core action. The 8% conversion rate against an 18-22% benchmark was the visible symptom of that gap between the two.

We started by listening rather than guessing. 24 user interviews and 3 rounds of usability testing surfaced the six jobs people actually hired the product for, jobs that had nothing to do with the menu structure the product had accumulated over time. That research became the basis for a new information architecture built around those jobs rather than around the product's internal modules.

With the architecture reorganised, we replaced the empty dashboard with a contextual onboarding flow that read a new user's stated goal and walked them straight toward it. Every trial now opens on a path to one of the six core jobs rather than a blank canvas, and that path was designed to reach a first meaningful action within 5 minutes of signup.