Personalizing Thrive’s Onboarding to Drive 23% More First-Week Engagement

Context

Thrive Global is a B2B SaaS platform designed to help organizations support employee well-being through personalized behavior-change programs. As the enterprise product matured, we noticed early onboarding was doing too much: it front-loaded information and asked users to understand the system before they’d experienced value.

Problem

The onboarding flow was overloaded with information and lacked personalization, causing users to:

• Struggle to tailor Thrive Global to their personal needs (too many options presented too early).
• Take fewer meaningful actions, leading to minimal engagement with the core tool.
• Feel overwhelmed after onboarding with unclear guidance on what to do first.

This led to slower habit-building and made it harder for users to discover the full value of Thrive.

Evidence

Through a combination of product analytics, user research, and customer feedback, we uncovered:

• Drop-off during onboarding before users reached their first “value moment.”
• Session recordings showing confusion and decision fatigue as users navigated too many choices.
• User interviews revealing employees wanted to set clear boundaries (e.g., reminders/check-ins) and focus on a single priority first.

We also heard from HR leaders that onboarding often felt like “another cognitive load,” not a supportive experience.

My Role

As the lead designer for Thrive’s onboarding initiative, I focused on building a scalable foundation for structured collaboration across teams, improving efficiency in delivery, and delivering a best-in-class onboarding experience for enterprise clients.

Key responsibilities included:

• 🔄 Ran end-to-end design - from discovery and ideation through high-fidelity design and developer handoff.
• 🧠 Facilitated workshops - with PM, engineering, and stakeholders to define key moments of personalization.
• 🧱 Scaling with the design system - creating modular onboarding components that could be adapted across enterprise setups.
• 🧪 Conducted moderated usability tests - validating flows, messaging, and recommendation patterns.
• 🤝 Partner with Customer Success - ensuring the experience aligned with enterprise rollout needs and communication styles.

Solution

We streamlined and personalized the onboarding experience by introducing:

• A “personal selector” upfront so users can choose a primary intent (focus), reducing noise and speeding up time-to-value.
• Preferences & reminders that let users set boundaries (when/how they want to be nudged).
• A tailored starting dashboard that reflects chosen priorities immediately after onboarding.

Impact

Belief

Behavior-change products work best when they reduce friction and make the “first right step” obvious. By guiding users toward a single priority, letting them set boundaries, and showing immediate relevance, we improved clarity without removing choice, we simply sequenced it.