Interactive Tutorial
Runwise is a smart building platform used by property teams to monitor systems, make operational changes, and respond to issues in real time.
Customer Success had a consistent problem: many new users were not engaging with or fully understanding core features, particularly heat boosts and settings changes, which are directly tied to product value and long-term retention. Internal data showed that early engagement strongly correlated with upsell readiness and net retention, indicating first-session experience was a critical business lever.
I designed an interactive onboarding tutorial targeted at first-time users, focused on guiding them through essential workflows inside the product.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Contribution
Onboarding experience design, UX architecture, Interaction design, User experience, Role-based flow design, Prototyping, Cross-functional alignment with PM, Eng & CSMs
The Challenge
Activation gap in early product use
CSMs reported that new users were often:
Logging in but not becoming meaningfully active
Avoiding or misunderstanding core actions like boosts and temperature settings
Relying heavily on Customer Success for basic product guidance
The platform itself is powerful, but complex. New users were being dropped into a dense interface without a clear understanding of what mattered most or how to begin.
This created friction at the exact moment when confidence, momentum, and perceived value should be highest.
Building page example
The Strategy
Task-based onboarding
For admin-level users, the tutorial guides them through three foundational actions:
Opening a building page
Running a heat boost
Adjusting a temperature target
For building users and view-only roles, the flow adapts to permissions, focusing on discovery and interpretation before actions:
Opening a building page
Expanding a graph
Interacting with that graph
This role-aware structure ensured that onboarding was relevant, not generic, and reinforced what each user type is actually responsible for in the product.
The Solution
An interactive, in-product guidance system
I designed an in-product interactive tutorial that automatically launches for new users and guides them through real product actions in a controlled environment.
Rather than introducing features, the experience is task-driven, helping users perform the same behaviors that correlate with long-term success. Most importantly, it prioritizes behavior change over feature exposure.
Functional requirements:
Launches only for first-time users
Supports both web and mobile
Uses a test account to safely simulate real workflows
Persists progress if users refresh or leave
Reinforces target areas with a branded treatment to focus attention and reduce decision friction
Captures completion and step-level analytics
Tutorial steps on a mobile device
The Impact
Accelerating activation at scale
Since launch, 481 users have initiated the tutorial, with a 95% completion rate and an average completion time of ~1 minute, indicating low friction and strong engagement.
By guiding users through core actions in a simulated environment, the experience helped new users move from first login to meaningful product interaction almost immediately.
Following rollout, the Customer Success team reported a noticeable decrease in onboarding-related support requests, signaling that the tutorial was successfully providing foundational guidance that previously required human support. This enabled teams to focus on higher-impact work.
Users are actively completing the tutorial across both desktop and mobile, validating the mobile experience and establishing a cross-platform foundation for in-product education.
Beyond the initial release, this work created a reusable onboarding framework the product team can continue to evolve to support feature adoption, education, and lifecycle engagement.