Microsoft Power Platform Community

From Sign-Up to Belonging: Designing the First Experience for New Community Members

Challenge

Microsoft Power Platform community sites used by millions of users worldwide. Yet community members who had just signed up had no guided first experience. Without a clear welcome flow, drop-off rates were high. New members left before ever discovering the resources, conversations, and exclusive features only available to community members.

To increase long-term retention and drive meaningful engagement, I partnered with a content strategist and UX researcher to design a first-run experience that connected new members to the right resources from the very first moment and gave them a compelling reason to keep coming back.

Outcomes

A warm, delightful onboarding experience that felt native to the product and never got in the way. New members were greeted with a guided welcome that was intuitive, accessible, and easy to dismiss

What I did

Shipped an onboarding welcome modal and three contextual tooltips that guided new members to exclusive features available only after sign-up
Built reusable onboarding components that scaled across multiple Microsoft community sites.

Process

Research

Audited onboarding flows from Meetup, Facebook, and Yammer to identify the engagement patterns and interaction models that drive new user activation, bringing external best practices into the Microsoft community context.

Exploration

Explored multiple directions for guiding new members through their first moments. Built wireframes and high-fidelity UI across variations before aligning on a modal and tooltip system that balanced visibility with non-intrusiveness.

Accessibility

Ensured the experience was usable by everyone, defining tab order, keyboard navigation flow, and WCAG compliance standards in close collaboration with engineering.