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Redefining employee onboarding experience

Redefining onboarding experience

Redefining Employee Onboarding Experience

A structured, service-design approach to identify and reduce ambiguity across the onboarding journey.

Experience_Design
Employee_Onboarding
UX_Design
Qualitative_Research

Role

UX Researcher

UX Researcher

Product -

Service Designer

Team

UX Designer

Tools

Figma

Google Suits

Timeline

2022 - 2 weeks

Full Time

Redefining Employee Onboarding Experience

A structured, service-design approach to identify and reduce ambiguity across the onboarding journey.

Experience_Design
Employee_Onboarding
UX_Design
Qualitative_Research

OVERVIEW


New hires at Incedo were losing trust somewhere in between, across the long, procedural stretch of client and project onboarding. Client-side ID generation was taking 2–3 weeks, and in that gap, new hires were dropping out before they'd even started.


Between 30–70% of employees were lost at pre-onboarding, against a company target of 30–40% retention improvement.


Incedo's Design Studio was brought in to understand why, and to find ways to hold people through the wait. Through interviews, focused group discussions, and a review of how other companies handle onboarding, the team mapped the full journey, every handoff, every touchpoint, every emotional dip and used it to shape a set of near-term and long-term fixes.


MY ROLE

As one of a small design team of three, I led the qualitative research and journey mapping, turning research into a single visual narrative that traced every phase from pre-joining to project onboarding, including the emotional highs and lows underneath. That map became the shared reference point the rest of the team's concept work was built on.

OVERVIEW


Patient 360 reenvisions the existing patient support platforms (Medallia, Qualtrics, Verint and others) already live and pulling in structured patient data through AI and machine learning. On paper, it had everything it needed. In practice, teams working inside it are stuck, KPI selections that produced blank charts instead of insight, no personalised direction on what to do next, and a rising cognitive load from a system that had data but no decision logic.


Rather than a full platform rebuild, this was a focused proof of concept: take two of the highest-friction domains like Access Solution and Voice of Customer, and redesign how each team could deep-dive into their own data independently, with clear guidance from insight to action.


MY ROLE

I owned this project end to end, from mapping the two domain stakeholders in this ecosystem around the platform, to diagnosing why the existing KPI logic was failing, to designing the individual Access Solution and Voice of Customer workflows following the Laws of Heuristics.

OUTCOME

OVERVIEW


Patient 360 reenvisions the existing patient support platforms (Medallia, Qualtrics, Verint and others) already live and pulling in structured patient data through AI and machine learning. On paper, it had everything it needed. In practice, teams working inside it are stuck, KPI selections that produced blank charts instead of insight, no personalised direction on what to do next, and a rising cognitive load from a system that had data but no decision logic.


Rather than a full platform rebuild, this was a focused proof of concept: take two of the highest-friction domains like Access Solution and Voice of Customer, and redesign how each team could deep-dive into their own data independently, with clear guidance from insight to action.


MY ROLE

I owned this project end to end, from mapping the two domain stakeholders in this ecosystem around the platform, to diagnosing why the existing KPI logic was failing, to designing the individual Access Solution and Voice of Customer workflows following the Laws of Heuristics.

1.

Reduced ambiguity with a progress tracker that kept new hires informed on status, without chasing updates

2.

Proposed bringing 3–4 scattered tools into one onboarding platform

3.

Shifted onboarding from a reactive to a proactive support model

The brief

Design a way to keep new hires engaged during the pre-onboarding gap, without being able to shorten the wait itself, since ID generation timelines sat outside the team's control.

RESEARCH

As the researcher,

The brief was to find where and why.

RESEARCH

As the researcher,

The brief was to

find where and why.

RESEARCH

Primary Research

13 Interviews and focused group discussions were run with HR, TA, and new hires, three sides of the same gap, each seeing a different part of it.


New hires described the wait as ambiguous: no clear sense of where they stood or what came next.


TAs described being stretched thin, fielding 10–20 issues a day with a team of 14, often losing candidates before they ever reached the client.

HR held the wider view, watching most exits stay regretted, but a smaller, growing share (15%) turn non-regretted, tied to mismatches that only surfaced after joining.

Primary Research

Interviews and focused group discussions were run with HR, TA, and new hires, three sides of the same gap, each seeing a different part of it.

New hires described the wait as ambiguous: no clear sense of where they stood or what came next.

TAs described being stretched thin, fielding 10–20 issues a day with a team of 14, often losing candidates before they ever reached the client.

HR held the wider view, watching most exits stay regretted, but a smaller, growing share (15%) turn non-regretted, tied to mismatches that only surfaced after joining.

Secondary Research


The team looked at how other organizations handled engagement during the 2021–2023 WFH period, when distance between hire and company became the norm rather than the exception.


A few patterns held across sources: connection had to be built deliberately, not left to happen on its own; buddy systems and early team touch-points consistently outperformed one-way communication; and visibility, knowing where you stood, mattered as much as warmth.

Trust, in a remote or pre-joining relationship, came less from big gestures and more from consistent small ones.

Secondary Research

The team looked at how other organizations handled engagement during the 2021–2023 WFH period, when distance between hire and company became the norm rather than the exception.

A few patterns held across sources: connection had to be built deliberately, not left to happen on its own; buddy systems and early team touch-points consistently outperformed one-way communication; and visibility, knowing where you stood, mattered as much as warmth.

Trust, in a remote or pre-joining relationship, came less from big gestures and more from consistent small ones.

at company

30-70%

pre client exit

The major driver was ambiguity during the 2–3 week wait for client-side ID generation, unclear timelines, made slower by an understaffed TA team.

A smaller share, 15%, were mismatched hires, non-regretted attrition tied to performance or expectations, not the wait itself.

ideal

~23%

attrition rate

-Statista

75-150%

replacement cost

That ambiguity rippled impacts to operational, financial, managerial, and cultural. And each one carried a real cost, replacing an employee in India typically runs 75–150% of their annual compensation.

The mapping

Those insights were mapped into personas, and from there into a full journey, every phase from pre-joining to project onboarding, every handoff between HR, TA, leaders, and teams, and critically, the emotional line running underneath it.

DEFINE

As a service designer,


The map didn't just show the journey.

It showed exactly where the communication disappeared.

As a service designer,


The map didn't just show

the journey.

It showed exactly where

the communication

disappeared.

CONCEPT

The response was framed as a set of design levers, transparency, communication, and progress visibility, each targeting a specific point where trust broke down during the wait.

Rather than treating engagement as a single problem, the approach split interventions by how quickly they could be executed against how deep a structural change they required, so the company could act immediately while also building toward a system that would hold long-term. Speed 2 addressed the structural gap: a shared platform to replace fragmented ownership across HR, TA, and leadership, built for sustained retention rather than a one-time engagement push.

Speed 1 Strategies covered operational gaps which handled the near-term fixes, several aimed directly at the dips the map surfaced. These could be achieved without new infrastructure of platform.

  • a buddy system introduced earlier, so new hires had a person before they had paperwork

  • visible progress tracking during document and background-check stages, so the wait wasn't silent

  • small onboarding souvenirs that carried presence when no person was available

Speed 2 Proposal was the longer bet and addressed the structural gap: a shared platform to replace fragmented ownership across HR, TA, and leadership, built for sustained retention

  • a proper onboarding platform built to hold the handoffs the map showed nobody owned