|B2B / ECOMMERCEConfluence is Atlassian's team workspace where organizations create, collaborate, and organize their work. New users often struggle with the blank-page problem when first setting up their workspace.
- Role
- Design Lead
- Category
- Onboarding
- Year
- 2022
How do we help first-time Confluence users get to value faster by recommending the right templates during setup?
Why this mattered
First-time users who didn't engage with templates during onboarding were significantly less likely to become activated users. The blank home screen created friction and confusion about where to start.
Behaviors to support
The setup flow should surface templates that match the user's role and industry, reducing the cognitive load of choosing from hundreds of options.
Limiting factors
During onboarding, we had minimal information about the user to base recommendations on.
North star metric
Track customer engagement through the onboard/setup flow and monitor if customers used the recommended templates, and had stronger down-funnel activations as a result.
our hypothesis:
Use role and industry signals collected in the setup flow to surface relevant template recommendations.
my impact
Designed the experiment and variant strategies
Defined the control and test variants, success metrics, and targeting criteria for the A/B experiment.
Sparred with leadership on prioritization
Worked with product leadership to align the experiment with broader onboarding goals and secure resources.
Partnered with engineering on technical constraints
Collaborated closely with engineers to ensure the template recommendation logic could ship within the timeline.
team + stakeholders
Alex Chen
Product Manager
Jordan Lee
Engineer
Taylor Kim
Content Designer
Morgan Patel
Product Designer
Partnered within FIND Pod; close partnership with Confluence in-product team.
Our Audience
First-time Confluence users
New users arriving at Confluence for the first time, often as part of a team that just signed up. They face a blank home screen and hundreds of template options with no guidance on where to start.
This is great! I can download this template from Confluence and import this into Microsoft Word...
a summarization of the process, effort, and output
The Flow
We redesigned the onboarding setup flow to include a template recommendation step. Based on the user's role and industry selections, the system would surface a curated set of templates.
The Destination
Users who selected a recommended template landed directly in the editor with pre-populated content, eliminating the blank-page problem and providing immediate value.
Results were measured across a 4-week experiment window with statistical significance reached at p<0.05 for the primary metric.
Up from 62% baseline
increase to setup completion rate
Statistically significant at p<0.05
reduction in time-to-provision
uptick in customer activations
experiment variants
personalized templates per onboarding variant
permutations of role vs industry