Nithya Suri · Product designer

Sheet B-05 / 05

Product design

Zenoti onboarding

Enterprise software, set up by a salon owner, alone, in half an hour.

Every new Zenoti customer needed an implementation team and about a week to get set up. For small salons and spas, 40 percent of the potential market, that was reason enough not to buy. The redesign turned forms of twenty or more fields into short contextual steps an owner finishes alone.

Client
Zenoti
Product
Self-serve onboarding for salons and spas
Year
2021
Scope
15 owner interviews · 3 flows tested · 8 owners in testing · tablet first
Role
Senior UX designer, design lead on small business onboarding
Team
Design head, UX writer, 2 product managers, 12 engineers
Timeline
36 weeks, 2021
Status
Shipped

Impact at a glance

average time to set up
1 wk → 28 min
completion, at launch and by week two, against an 80 percent goal
78% → 82%
small business self-service adoption
+60%
support tickets
−20%

Measured in Mixpanel, Hotjar and internal metrics, at launch and over the following three months. The one week is the assisted implementation a customer used to wait through; the 28 minutes is an owner completing setup alone, so the two are not the same task, only the same outcome: a business ready to book.

Evidence trail

Every claim on this sheet, traced from the evidence to the decision it drove and how it was validated.

ClaimEvidenceDecision it droveValidation
Owners will not spend a week on setup15 salon and spa owner interviews, contextual observationGoal of under 30 minutes, set before design Field researchn = 15
Owners learn by doing, not by wizardOne-week sprint: three flows tested with eight ownersContextual onboarding shipped Validated with usersn = 8
Average setup 28 minutesMixpanel, at launchOutcome of the shipped design Measured in product
Completion 78% at launch, 82% by week twoMixpanelProgress indicators added in week two Measured in productAgainst an 80% goal
Support demand tracked after launchInternal support metricsThree fixes shipped: progress indicators, simpler hours, save and continue later Measured in productCompletion rose to 82% by week two
Self-service adoption up 60%, support tickets down 20%Internal metrics over three monthsOutcome of the shipped design Measured in product

Method: field research finds the problem, each finding drives one decision, decisions are validated with users or leadership, and outcomes are measured in the product.

The shipped employees step on a tablet: who are your employees, with a short form, the people already added, and help beside it.

The problem

  • An implementation team for every customer. Setup took about a week.
  • Enterprise features overwhelmed small businesses. Drop-off was high.
  • Support costs grew with every new customer.
  • The opportunity. Small businesses were 40 percent of the potential market, against competitors such as Mangomint, Fresha and Boulevard.

The bar was set before any design:

Metric Goal
Time to value Under 30 minutes
Completion rate Above 80 percent, with 45 percent as the bar to launch
Customers needing setup support Under 20 percent

What the research found

From the docs

I can’t spend a week learning software.

How. Fifteen interviews with salon and spa owners, contextual observation of real onboarding sessions, and a journey map of the current process.

  • Time. “I can’t spend a week learning software.”
  • Control. “I want to figure it out myself.”
  • Risk. “How do I know this won’t break my business?”
  • Complexity. “Too many features I don’t need.”
The synthesis. Three pain points came out of every interview: personnel, complexity and time.

Three principles followed:

  • Progressive disclosure. Show only what is needed, when it is needed.
  • Just-in-time learning. Contextual help at each step.
  • Start simple, add later. The essentials on day one, advanced settings once the business is running.

Before and after

Before · the enterprise setup form

After · the hours step, shipped

  1. Forty-two time dropdowns at once become one slider per day.
  2. Smart defaults pre-fill what can be inferred.
  3. Icons and clear type replace a wall of labels.
  4. Tooltips sit at the point of need, on a touch-friendly tablet-first layout.
The same opening hours, collected two ways: the enterprise Hours tab, six time dropdowns for each of seven days, then one slider per day. Click either image for full size.
Zenoti onboarding · shipped flow
The shipped onboarding, end to end: sign in, taxes, hours, employees, services, done. Each step teaches the feature it configures.

Concept to validation in one week

  • Days 1 to 2. Three flow variations sketched.
  • Days 3 to 4. Interactive Figma prototypes.
  • Day 5. Tested with eight business owners.
  • Result. Two pivots, wizard to guided tour and then guided tour to contextual onboarding, and one learning: owners want to learn by doing, not walk a linear wizard.
From the sprint. The sketch that turned a linear wizard into a checklist owners finish as they go. It is the one original artefact left from 2021.
The three models the eight owners tried. The wizard and the tour are reconstructions, redrawn in 2026 from the sprint notes because the 2021 prototypes were not kept; the third is the shipped step. The wizard locks everything behind step four; the tour explains the product and leaves setup at zero.
Just-in-time sign-up
The sign-up steps before setup, on the same pattern: one question per screen, help beside it, and a clear moment of done.

Working with engineering

  • How. Weekly design and development syncs, component-first thinking, and a phased rollout.
  • Handed over. Detailed Figma specs, component documentation and mobile breakpoint guidelines.
  • Constraints. A legacy codebase, responsive layouts that needed refactoring, and twelve existing module integrations.
  • The trade-off. Making every screen responsive meant refactoring legacy layouts, so the flow was designed tablet first, the device owners set up on, and shipped in phases rather than all at once.

What changed

  • At launch. 78 percent completion, past the 45 percent bar to launch, 28 minutes on average, and 62 percent finished without any support.
  • Week two. Progress indicators took completion to 82 percent, past the 80 percent goal.
  • Month one. A simpler opening hours flow.
  • Month three. Save and continue later.
  • Support. 62 percent finished setup with no support at all on day one. Support demand was tracked from launch, and the three post-launch changes above were aimed straight at the rest.
  • Overall. Small business self-service adoption up 60 percent and support tickets down 20 percent. Measured in Mixpanel, Hotjar and internal metrics.

The flow became the template for other onboarding flows in the product.

With the team

  • Lead designer for small business onboarding, with a design head, a UX writer, two product managers and twelve engineers. I owned the onboarding flow end to end, from research to the post-launch fixes.
  • Five business owners stayed involved through the 36 weeks.

Revisions

Δ1
Fifteen salon and spa owner interviews and contextual onboarding observations.
Δ2
Success metrics set before design. Under 30 minutes, above 80 percent completion.
Δ3
One week sprint, three flows tested with eight owners, wizard to guided tour to contextual onboarding.
Δ4
Post-launch, progress indicators, a simpler hours flow and save and continue later, in answer to the support miss.