Teamwork Collection Onboarding

Role

Content Design Lead

Company

Atlassian

Timeline

~10 months

Collaborators

Product Design, Content Designers, Design Leadership, Brand & Creative

In this case study

Content Strategy, UX Writing, Onboarding, Journey Mapping, End-to-end Experience, Cross-functional Collaboration, Launch Communications

At the peak of my time managing 4 separate product areas as the sole content designer on the team, I was unexpectedly made the content lead on a Growth project. This project was a joint effort between Atlassian Home (one of my 4 product areas) and the Growth team, and I was originally meant to be supporting a content designer from Growth. But for some reason (which I never fully learned), the Growth content designer was moved to another project and I was asked to take over and lead content design for the onboarding.

It's never easy taking over a project mid-stream, but it did give me a chance to build a fresh content strategy, which is exactly what this project needed.

Project highlights

To support the launch of Teamwork Collection (TWC), a new app bundle consisting of Jira, Confluence, and Loom, we worked with designers from Growth to deliver an onboarding experience in Atlassian Home.

I led and delivered all the content for this project, including:

  • End user content strategy, contributed back to the overall content strategy for TWC.
  • Email content to notify users of app access.
  • UI copy for the entire flows.
  • Content variants across email and modal content (20+ modal variants condensed to 6 to alleviate engineering load).
  • Onboarding spotlights on Home, plus app-specific onboarding for Goals, Projects, and Teams apps (other platform apps I was responsible for).
  • Script for onboarding hero video.

Background and context

In an attempt to alleviate longstanding confusion around which Atlassian apps should be used for what purpose and when, the product organization began grouping apps into bundles called "collections." Teamwork Collection was the first one to be announced, consisting of Atlassian's core collaboration apps: Jira, Confluence, and Loom.

Unfortunately none of the versions I could find of this visual actually spell out the app name. But maybe that's the point because the visible labels more directly answer the question, 'What do I use these for?'

For Teamwork Collection's launch, the central growth team was tasked with the onboarding experience which they wanted to live in Atlassian Home since that's what was squarely positioned as the "hub" app between all Atlassian apps. Jira, Confluence, and Loom all had their own individual onboarding experiences, and while a consolidated, TWC onboarding was planned, the initial onboarding would be a general intro to each app through Atlassian Home.

There were meant to be 4 of us working on this: one content + product design duo from Home and one duo from Growth, with the latter leading the design work. But a couple months into the project, design leadership asked me to take over as the content lead and work on content strategy and delivery on my own.

I never got the full story about what happened, nor did I really ask or seek it out. All my manager told me was that the content just wasn't getting to where we needed it to be and so they wanted me to take over. If I had to guess, it was because a lot of what the Growth content designer had written thus far leaned heavily into marketing content, which made sense because the overarching content strategy for TWC was predominantly sales-focused. And that was ultimately the problem: the existing content strategy was written for buyers, not end users. We needed to focus the onboarding away from the marketing and actually deliver content that's relevant to the users getting these apps for the first time.

The end(user)game strategy

The first thing I did was write a new content strategy for this particular project. The existing TWC content strategy was written for buyers, admins, and general decision makers, so it made sense that the other content designer's work leaned heavily toward marketing. Since TWC was mostly a pricing and packaging change, there wasn't much need for an end user onboarding strategy since access to apps was the only thing really changing.

One thing I advocated for in particular was avoiding mention of "Teamwork Collection" in both the onboarding and general end user experience. The name of the collection made sense for the buyer personas, but for users gaining access to new apps, the name of the bundle that their boss's boss's boss's boss bought would at best be trivial and at worst confusing. The actual end users, or those who have no say in the buying decision at all, don't need to understand what exactly TWC is — only that they have access to new Atlassian tools.

I centered the content strategy around the "new tool access" message, with two key audience segments:

Net new Atlassian users

No current Atlassian access, getting access to all TWC + platform apps.

  • Assumptions

    A new employee or an existing employee gaining access to Atlassian for the first time.

  • Psychographics

    Overwhelmed, trying to figure out new tooling and team processes.

  • Primary goal

    Trying to get set up with TWC apps (and all other software tools they will need) as quickly as possible.

  • Target message

    Clear tool definitions to get them up and running faster.

Existing Atlassian users

Currently uses at least one Atlassian app, and is now gaining all/remaining TWC apps.

  • Assumptions

    A regular user of an existing app, familiar with interactions and standards.

  • Psychographics

    Annoyed, resistant to change/new tooling, may see onboarding as a nuisance.

  • Primary goal

    Dismiss any intrusive messages and get on with their work.

  • Target message

    Their current tools work better with the new ones.

Modal overwhelming

One of the key parts of the onboarding experience was the modal, which would display either the first time a user lands in Home after gaining TWC access or after clicking the link in the email. This would potentially be their first in-app experience with their new apps and we wanted to target the modal content to the user experience as much as possible. So whether they were a net new user or an existing Atlassian user, we wanted the modal to reflect their circumstance as much as we could. But to actually target the content to the exact granularity we wanted would mean over 20 modal variants — to which the lead engineer said, "No."

The new user modal focuses on aspirational language with scannable, single-line definitions of each core app.
One of the existing user modal variants which targeted ~80% of users in this segment.

Instead, I made it a content problem and asked, "How can I consolidate some of these user circumstances into similar groupings with slightly more generalized content?" The variants included which apps a user was getting access to, whether they had the additional platform apps enabled, and if they were in the 80% of existing users getting TWC at launch who already had Jira and Confluence. Through ✨content magic✨ (which was actually just painstaking stress-testing and plugging in minute changes across variants), I was able to get the number of variants down to 6.

1
Modal variant 1
  • New Atlassian users
  • Access to Jira, Confluence, and Loom
  • Access to Goals and Projects

Our work on this modal also established a new pattern for spotlight modals, replacing the old one in the design system with this 2-column format with more options for scalability. While my two product design counterparts created the overall design spec and guidelines (which are still internal only), I wrote the guidance for content on the modal, including character counts, content suggestions, and do's/don'ts.

I found this Trello example in the wild, which incidentally does a great job showing the pattern's scalability with its expandable bullet sections and individual CTAs.

HubSpot(lights)

With the spotlights, we wanted them to be fairly straightforward without treading the same ground as the modal before it. Since it's onboarding for a bundle of apps as well, the spotlights served to orient the user on the core purpose of Atlassian Home, plus the platform components that they would be able to access from any app. The second spotlight in particular highlights the primary way users can navigate between the apps they just heard about in the modal and any other Atlassian apps they have access to.

The deck of onboarding cards

Another prominent feature of the onboarding was a series of cards outlining individual app/experience onboarding and tasks they could complete as part of exploring their new apps:

In order to align with the aspect of "clear tool definitions", the bolded headline of each card needed to explain the core action/function of an app in exactly one line. I landed on the format of [verb] [object] with [app] plus a short body to describe the core benefit/elaborate on the primary action of the app.

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Bonus round: the onboarding video script

You might've noticed in the Home screens above that one of onboarding cards mentions a video. The thought, in our early planning, was that we would plug in whatever standard, "What is Teamwork Collection?" type video to help users understand. The only problem was that existing assets were also very heavily marketing focused and weren't actively helpful for end users.

For the onboarding, we wanted something closer to a demo that shows why these apps are all better together. While brand and creative would be creating video itself, I was tasked with writing the script to best show off each app, plus platform apps and Rovo (Atlassian's AI solution)—all in under 2 minutes.

I wrote several drafts and iterations based on stakeholder feedback, partnering with both the lead TWC content designer and a copywriter from the creative/brand team to align with Atlassian's brand voice. We did have to include a mention of TWC since the caveat was that, while it was made for the onboarding, it would need to have flexibility to be used in other contexts. So what we ended up with had to work well for all audiences, and ended up being a nice blend of marketing and user-focused content.