Aug 19, 2021

More scalable invite system

After implementing our self-serve onboarding flow (Product Update 7/2021), we've continued streamlining our invite process to gradually onboard 20,000+ people from our waitlist.

Since we are still in beta, signing up at app.flowrite.com is not possible unless we've added you on our allowlist, a process that we used to do manually until this month.

Now, users are given a unique URL to our signup page where they activate their beta invite. Users also have a chance to use a different email than what they signed up to the waitlist with.

In the background, we look up our database to make sure that the URL is eligible for access, and add the chosen email to the allowlist.

Onboarding improvements

We analyzed some of the feedback from our recent onboardings and implemented several improvements to the flow:

Checklist

We designed and implemented a beautiful checklist to the sidebar to guide the user through the first actions after finishing the initial setup.

Streamlined extension installation flow

One of the goals with of our onboarding is to get users to adopt our browser extension – the primary way of using Flowrite for daily communication.

In addition to having it as part of the checklist, we now display a pop-up with a quick tutorial to helps users use the extension after installing it from the Chrome Web Store.

Other

• We fixed an issue that was causing the sign up to sometimes get stuck for 30-60 seconds
• We repositioned the pink dots in the Flowriting tutorial to follow a more consistent positioning
• We implemented a subtle pop-up on mobile & tablet screen sizes to suggest switching to a larger screen
• We changed several copies to avoid confusing users
• We adjusted the persona categories to cater product people 🧑💻

New templates in the collection

We analyzed some of the templates created by our beta users, did some testing on them, and added the best ones to our template collection:

🏕  Out of office
👌  Give feedback on task
🏓  I will get back to you

Event-based activation emails

This month, we moved away from a one-size-fits-all email activation flow, which used to bombard users with tips and tricks without considering where they were in their user journey.

From now on, new users are welcomed with smart event-based emails that teach them to write better emails faster at their own pace.

In addition to educating the user and helping them forward whenever there's a bump on the road, we focused especially on enabling them to build a habit of flowriting. To do that, we enlisted the help of our early users to share their best practices for making Flowrite a part of users' daily workflow.

Other improvements

• We fixed an issue that caused the automatic template to not function in the web app.
• We did a slight redesign on some of the buttons in the web app's sidebar to enable smoother selection.