Swing Education
Substitute Teaching Onboarding
Timeline
6 months
Role
design lead and product manager
Methods
discovery, visual design, prototyping, testing, design system
Challenges
Each substitute teacher on the platform completes the onboarding process to meet legal and compliance requirements. However, the existing experience had several pain points:
In our largest territory, California, the conversion rate was 4.54%.
52% of customer support time was spent on onboarding tickets.
On average, it would take users 31 days to complete onboarding tasks.
Due to significant technical debt, it was extremely difficult to ship improvements.
Over the course of the project, we had high PM turnover which led to misalignment.
legacy experience
Discovery
Data Analysis
This graph shows the number of users who completed each step of the onboarding process, highlighting where drop-offs occur.
Stakeholder Interviews
With no documentation on the end-to-end onboarding process, I began by interviewing colleagues across Product, Engineering, Operations, HR, Legal, Finance, and Customer Support to understand the steps.
User Journey
I documented the onboarding flow and mapped user journeys for substitutes, schools, and the internal team.
Immersive Research
During user interviews, Swing subs described onboarding positively which contradicted the quantitative data. Rather than letting ambiguity stall progress, I became a Swing substitute myself.
Competitive Research
Before diving into ideation, I gathered insights on successful onboarding flows, layouts, tone, and language.
direct competitor - Scoot Education
indirect competitor (marketplace) - Lyft
indirect competitor (education) - Teach for America
Ideation
We realized technical debt was a blocker that made many ideas high-effort, prompting us to ask what modernization could unlock.
Design
Wireframing
Medium Fidelity
Design System
Legacy was built without a design system which introduced an incredible number of variants for how information was presented to users.
I stress tested my designs to consolidate the types of components we would need to support every onboarding requirements in every territory. I collaborated with engineering to ensure the design system aligned with the data model and prioritized atomic design principles.
Now, for the onboarding flow in other states, engineering is able to create “skeleton files” and I’m able to configure the front-end using the Step, Question, and Answer Options structure. When customer support shares that users are confused at a given step, I’m able to create merge requests with minor UI or copy updates to address the issue with minimal engineering support.
When the team wanted to create “Skill Builders” for substitute teachers, we were able to reuse the components to ship a net new feature very quickly.
Results
Onboard rate rose 7%, sub activation grew 16% and customer acquisition cost dropped 10% with flat ad spend.
Still the highest ticket volume category, but we've reduced ticket volume by 12%.
On average, it now takes 33 days to complete - a tradeoff that reduced ticket volume but increased completion time.
We modernized the backend and built a design system, enabling faster onboarding updates across regions and copy edits without engineering.
I proactively stepped in as product manager during a vacancy to ensure we met business goals.
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