Which users do you want to have to go through the onboarding

First you have to decide whether your onboarding wizard should be active for new users only, which is the default, or for all users.

Usually, the default for new users only will be sufficient. You probably don't want to bother users with an onboarding wizard who have been working in the system for years.

But maybe your system is brand new and there has been a test phase, so users already exist, but they were only testing. When going live with your system you might want to have all users the onboarding experience. That could be one use case for the option to show it to all users.

In any case, once a user has finished the onboarding, they will not see it again.

Title and additional welcoming message

Now you'll want to write some welcoming words for your users. There's room for a title and an additional message. These two items will appear on top of every step of your onboarding process.

Adding steps to the onboarding wizard

In the next step it's time to configure the actual contents of your onboarding wizard. As every wizard it can consist of several steps. Every step is represented by one module. In fact, you can add as many modules as you'd like, but the experience from our user tests shows, that people get antsy if there's too many steps. Three or four seems to be okay with most people. Select the type of module you want to add and click the button next to your selection. Don't worry about the order of the steps, you can sort them any way you like afterwards.

At this point, there's only two different modules available: Profile fields and Profile Picture. Both require the Linchpin User Profiles app to be active. You can add several versions of each module into your onboarding process. Obviously it doesn't make sense to ask the user to upload a profile picture several times. But maybe you want them to fill out a plethora of profile fields. In this case it's good to split them up a bit ask for these fields in two or three steps, maybe grouped by common themes: one step for contact info, one step for professional info and skills, and one for personal info like hobbies and interests, or whatever else you have in your profile fields setup.

Content configuration: User profile fields module

At the top of the configuration you'll see three texts you can set.

• A short name for display on the progress bar (as this is a kind of wizard, users are shown a progress bar containing all the steps, so they have some orientation about how far into the onboarding process they are).
• A headline
• A subline where you can add additional information. Give your users some orientation as to why you are asking for these fields. Maybe the personalization of your intranet depends on them, or maybe you want to allow for more collaboration between employees. In any case, users appreciate being told why they should give their info here.

Below that you'll find the configuration for the profile fields. You can use two columns if you are asking users to fill out a lot of profile fields. The fields will be shown to users in the order you select them here.

Mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk both for you here in the configuration as well as in the onboarding wizard for the users. Users have to fill out those mandatory fields in order to finish the onboarding. Other fields they can leave blank if they wish to.

Please note: If you have fields that are filled by an external source (LDAP, xml), and are not editable by the user, you still can configure them to be shown in the onboarding. The user will see the contents of these fields, but cannot change them. Please be sure that you have an important reason for showing such fields, as they can be confusing for users.

If a field is filled already (maybe an admin as filled in info when creating the new user), it will still show up if configured here, and the existing info will be shown. If it's a field the user can edit, they can change the field value during onboarding.

The second screenshot on the left shows an example of what users will see.

Content configuration: User profile picture module

For this module there's only three informational text fields you can configure. The picture upload itself has no further options to it.

• A short name for display on the progress bar (as this is a kind of wizard, users are shown a progress bar containing all the steps, so they have some orientation about how far into the onboarding process they are).
• A headline
• A subline where you can add additional information. Give your users some orientation as to why you are asking for their picture.

The second screenshot on the left shows an example of what users will see.

Ordering the steps, deleting steps

On the right hand side of each module or step you'll see icons for deleting or moving the module. Please note that the arrows for ordering the steps only show up as soon as you add a second module. There's not much need for changing the order of modules while you only have one, right? The trash can icon for deleting a module will be there always, though.

Saving, preview and activating the onboarding process

On the very bottom of your configuration you'll find a Save button that allows you to save your progress. This doesn't activate the onboarding for users though.

Activating is a separate step. The activation toggle you can see on the second and third screenshot is located at the top of your configuration. Only if this is set to green, the onboarding you configured is activated and will be shown to eligible users.

If you want to have a preview of your onboarding while configuring, you can open it in a separate browser tab:
https://your-domain.com/plugins/linchpin-onboarding/onboarding.action

Of course, you'll have to replace the url part with your actual domain.