Marylin Balsano
Back to all work

Designing a Workflow-Driven Onboarding Experience

2026

Case Study: Designing a Workflow-Driven Onboarding Experience

Role: Senior Product Design Manager

Team: 1 Product Designer (direct report), Product Manager, Engineering

Product: Bluebeam Web — cloud-based document collaboration and markup platform for construction teams

Overview

Bluebeam Web was expanding its capabilities for cloud-based collaboration, but new users were struggling to understand where to start when entering the product.

At the same time, the team was building a new homepage experience, creating an opportunity to design a purpose-built onboarding experience that could introduce users to the most important workflows.

As the Product Design Manager, I partnered with my Product Designer to define the strategy, guide the discovery process, and shape the overall onboarding framework.

The goal was to create an onboarding experience that:

Problem

As Bluebeam Web expanded, new users entering the product often lacked clarity on what to do first.

Unlike many SaaS products, Bluebeam is used by professionals in architecture, engineering, and construction who are typically:

At the same time, the product had recently expanded to support several new cloud workflows including document markup, project version control, and real-time collaboration.

This created a critical onboarding challenge:

How might we help new users quickly understand the most valuable workflows in Bluebeam Web without interrupting their work or forcing them through rigid tutorials?

The Challenge

Bluebeam Web is used by professionals in architecture, engineering, and construction who are often:

Traditional onboarding patterns such as step-by-step walkthroughs or coach marks risk interrupting users who simply want to begin working.

We needed an onboarding approach that:

Discovery

Because we were simultaneously designing the new homepage, the team ran a focused discovery phase to understand:

Defining Success

During discovery, the team aligned on the outcomes this onboarding experience needed to achieve.

User Outcomes

Business Outcomes

Product Outcomes

Discovery Activities

We conducted a short discovery sprint including:

We also created a Swivel Chair Talk to align product, design, and engineering on the onboarding direction.

This helped ensure the team shared a clear understanding of:

Key Insight: Different Users Want Different Levels of Guidance

One of the most important findings was that users approach onboarding differently.

We identified three behavioral groups:

  1. Guided learners: Users who want step-by-step help immediately.
  2. Explorers with optional help: Users who prefer to explore first but want guidance available if needed.
  3. Independent explorers: Users who prefer no guidance and want to discover the product themselves.

This insight shaped the entire onboarding strategy.

Instead of forcing onboarding on users, we designed it to be optional and dismissible, while remaining easy to access later.

Identifying the Core Workflows

During discovery we analyzed which tasks represented the core value of Bluebeam Web.

Three workflows emerged as the most important:

  1. Mark up a document
  2. Check out a document in Studio Projects
  3. Collaborate in a Studio Session

These three workflows became the foundation of the onboarding experience.

Design Strategy

We designed onboarding around three principles:

  1. Start with real value: Rather than explaining the product, onboarding should help users do something meaningful immediately.
  2. Reduce setup friction: New users shouldn’t need to upload their own files just to experiment.
  3. Encourage exploration: Users should feel free to explore without being locked into a tutorial.

The Solution

An Optional Onboarding Side Panel

We introduced an onboarding experience called Explore Bluebeam Web, presented as a side panel on the homepage.

This panel:

Users who close the panel can easily access it again later.

This ensures onboarding remains helpful but never intrusive.

Gamified Learning Through “Missions”

Instead of traditional tutorials, we designed missions that allow users to learn through action.

Each mission introduces a specific capability inside the product.

Examples include:

These missions are optional, allowing users to:

Creating Safe Playgrounds for Learning

One challenge we identified was that users may hesitate to experiment with their own project files.

To solve this, we created sample documents that act as a safe playground.

Users can:

without affecting real work.

This significantly lowers the barrier to learning.

Avoiding Over-Guidance

Because Bluebeam Web was intentionally designed to be intuitive, we avoided heavy onboarding patterns such as:

Instead, we focused on light guidance through missions and contextual tips.

However, during this initiative we also began exploring coach mark patterns for Bluebeam Revu, the company’s desktop product, where workflows are more complex.

Completing the Onboarding Journey

Once users complete the onboarding missions, or choose to skip them, they are presented with a resource hub including:

This allows users to continue learning at their own pace.

Leadership & Collaboration

As the Product Design Manager, I supported this initiative by:

This work also helped inform onboarding approaches used later in other parts of the Bluebeam ecosystem.

Expanding the Framework

This onboarding approach also informed exploration of onboarding patterns for Bluebeam Revu, the company’s desktop product.

Because Revu contains more advanced functionality, we began exploring additional guidance patterns such as:

This work helped establish a broader conversation within the organization around product adoption and in-product learning.

Impact

This onboarding initiative helped:

It also established a repeatable onboarding framework that could scale across additional Bluebeam products.

Why This Project Matters

For professionals in architecture and construction, time is limited and learning new tools must happen quickly.

This project demonstrated how thoughtful onboarding can:

while respecting users’ need to get real work done.