Progressive narrative
Each message now had a clear role:
- educate customers about the service
- reinforce the value proposition
- set expectations
- guide next steps
Onboarding: When the service begins after the sale
How we structured Lemon's post-signup journey so customers understood where they stood — and why it was worth the wait.
After signing up, customers could wait up to 90 days. Without a clear onboarding experience, they had no visibility into the process and couldn't see the value — which hurt activation and satisfaction.
As the acquisition flow matured, it became clear that the post-signup experience needed real structure.
Key blockers:
- No visibility into the process
- Difficulty understanding the service
- No sense of progress or follow-up
- Outstanding tasks left unresolved by customers
Many customers didn't know they had pending actions, which meant they were unknowingly holding up their own process.
Strategic Impact
Before onboarding
Customers went 60–90 days with no visibility
Onboarding-related issues accounted for ~50% of support contacts
Scaling would have required 100+ people on the operations team
Customers who didn't submit documents simply fell off the radar
After onboarding
Customers could navigate the process on their own
Reduced dependence on the operations team
Infrastructure ready to handle growing customer volume
My role
I led the end-to-end definition of the onboarding experience
Field research, async research, and funnel and behavioral data analysis
Journey mapping and product conception
Restructuring the communication cadence and customer touchpoints
Scoping the MVP
Cross-functional alignment to make delivery possible
The core design question: How do you give visibility and create a sense of value in a long, slow process — and make sure customers know when they need to act for things to move forward?
Framing the Problem
Funnel analysis and customer research helped us shape hypotheses and guiding principles.
“I finished the registration, but did it work? When will my discount arrive? I still don't understand much of what will happen. Will I receive it by email?”
“How do I know that I will actually start receiving the energy credits? I didn't have enough information.”
Field research conducted in Belo Horizonte
Strategic hypotheses
- Visibility reduces uncertainty
- Poorly managed expectations drive support volume and frustration
- Value needs to feel real before the savings show up
Experience pillars
Transparency — where am I in the process?
Expectation-setting — how much longer?
Value — why is it worth the wait?
What the journey needed to solve
Transparency
Knowing where you are and what needs to be done
Expectation-setting
Understanding how long is left
Value
Feeling the benefit before and beyond the savings
Trust
Reducing anxiety and uncertainty
Agency
Resolving outstanding tasks independently
Product Decisions
Those pillars translated into concrete product decisions
Show status even when not all data is available yet
Hide internal steps to avoid exposing unnecessary complexity
Prioritize perceived value over technical completeness
Treat onboarding as part of the product — not just a support problem
Make required actions clearly visible, with guidance on what to do and immediate access to resolve them
Use progressive disclosure to deepen the customer's understanding of the service throughout onboarding
Solution structure
Defined within the app:
- Step-by-step timeline
- Actionable pending items
- Automated status updates
- Product introduction and education
MVP Delivery & Validation
- Prototyping and technical alignment
- Coordination with operations teams
- Development in sprints
- Full rollout to 100% of the customer base in April 2023
- Async remote usability and validation testing
Onboarding Evolution
After launch, we spotted a problem: even though the onboarding area was live, many customers weren't accessing the journey or keeping up with the process.
The insight
The onboarding area was entirely dependent on messages to be discovered. When the communication cadence broke down, the journey simply didn't happen.
The real failure was in the messaging cadence.
Gaps of up to 45 days with no contact
Messages not reaching all customers
Inconsistent content and formatting
Dependency on imprecise operational triggers
Rebuilding the cadence
We redesigned the communication layer as a core part of the product, not a bolt-on.
Product integration
Messages consistently drove customers back to the app, establishing the onboarding area as the main place to track progress.
Results
Fewer gaps in communication throughout the journey
Customers had a clearer sense of what to expect
Pending items became easier to understand and act on
Foundation in place to track and improve engagement metrics going forward
Strategic Takeaways
The problem wasn't the interface — it was behavior across the full journey.
Simply showing progress reduced uncertainty and cut support contacts, even without speeding up the actual process.
Without consistent messaging, customers disengaged and the onboarding stopped doing its job.
Shipping the first version early made it possible to see exactly where people got stuck — especially outside the app, in the communication layer.
