Case Study
Shaping Bloom’s onboarding around trust and commitment
Project Role
Company
About the project
Bloom is a career development app combining human coaching, psychometric assessments and AI-enhanced mentoring to drive professional growth at scale.
I joined Bloom as part of a small, early-stage design team working across the end-to-end mobile experience. As the team evolved, I became the primary product designer responsible for core app features, leading research synthesis, prototyping and interaction design across the native app. While strategic direction was shaped collaboratively with the Head of Design and cross-functional stakeholders, I was responsible for translating research insights into shipped experiences.
One of the most significant projects I worked on was Bloom’s onboarding journey. Across multiple research-led iterations, the experience evolved from an early-stage flow focused on quickly moving users towards their first coaching session into an onboarding journey designed to build trust, establish accountability and help users feel confident starting their coaching journey.
Team: Head of Design, Product Designer (Me), Brand Designer, Product/Engineering
Platform: Native iOS + Android
Timeline: ~2 years (spanning multiple onboarding and coaching model evolutions)
Challenge
Bloom’s core product loop begins when a user books and completes their first coaching Check-in. Until that first session happens, the product’s value remains largely theoretical, making early engagement critical to the user journey.
However, coaching is an inherently personal experience. It asks users to discuss their professional ambitions, anxieties and areas for growth with someone they have never met before.
The challenge was designing an onboarding experience that balanced business goals with user needs: encouraging users towards their first Check-in while also giving them enough context, clarity and personal relevance to feel comfortable taking that first step.
Approach
Designing Bloom’s onboarding was an iterative process that evolved alongside the product itself. Rather than approaching onboarding as a single feature, we treated it as a series of hypotheses around what users needed to feel ready to engage with coaching.
Early iterations were primarily shaped through moderated and unmoderated prototype testing with prospective users. Research focused on three key questions:
• Did users understand how Bloom and its coaching model worked?
• Did the onboarding experience feel intuitive and easy to progress through?
• Did users feel informed and motivated enough to book their first Check-in?
As the product matured and pilot versions launched, we were also able to compare research findings against real user behaviour. Engagement patterns, booking behaviour and pilot outcomes helped validate assumptions and highlight where user needs were still not being met.
Insights from both research and product data were reviewed and synthesised with the wider team before informing subsequent iterations.
Process
Hypothesis 1: The coach should onboard the user
The first onboarding flow was built around a simple product philosophy: the coach would onboard the user, not the app. Rather than walking users through a lengthy onboarding flow, the idea was that users would be introduced to the product and define their goals through their first coaching experience.
After signing up, users moved through a brief introduction to Bloom’s core pillars before being directed straight to booking their first Check-in. The broader product experience remained locked until that session was completed.
This approach was driven by a business need to establish the coaching relationship quickly and demonstrate value early. However, testing revealed that the flow was asking users to commit before they had enough information or context to feel comfortable doing so.
Users frequently developed incomplete or inaccurate expectations about how coaching worked, and many expressed hesitation when asked to book a session with someone they knew nothing about. Several participants described feeling like they were “going in blind”, with some indicating they would have abandoned the journey entirely.
Through research synthesis, we identified a clear pattern: the onboarding flow had been designed around what the business needed rather than what users needed. Trust, context and personal relevance had to come before commitment.
Hypothesis 2: More context would improve commitment
The second iteration of onboarding focused on addressing immediate gaps in user understanding and buy-in before Check-in booking. The assumption was that providing clearer context and a stronger sense of personalisation would reduce hesitation around booking a first session.
To improve product understanding, we introduced a series of expectation-setting screens after sign-up, outlining Bloom’s core pillars and coaching model. Goal selection was moved earlier in the journey to give users a stronger sense of agency and make the experience feel more personally relevant. We also introduced additional questions around role, coaching experience and personal context before Check-in booking to help tailor the first coaching session.
While these changes improved users’ initial understanding of the product and helped create a stronger sense of personal relevance, many users still felt hesitant to commit to a coaching session. Uncertainty remained around what coaching would actually look like in practice, with users wanting greater visibility into who they would be working with and stronger signals that the experience would adapt to their individual goals and circumstances.
As pilot versions launched, behavioural data reinforced these findings. Low booking rates, poor retention and high cancellation and no-show rates suggested that users still lacked enough confidence and motivation to follow through.
Research also highlighted a disconnect between the personalised onboarding experience and what users encountered afterwards. Although users could now enter the product before booking, they were immediately introduced to a predefined coaching journey with a fixed cadence and structured Check-ins. Each session had a prescribed focus and expected outcome, leaving little room for users to shape the experience around their own circumstances.
Synthesising research and pilot data, we ultimately identified a broader product challenge that could not be solved by onboarding alone: the existing coaching model was not flexible enough to support the level of ownership and personalisation users needed. The product was asking users to fit into a predefined coaching structure rather than shaping the experience around their own goals, needs and motivations.
Hypothesis 3: Greater ownership would increase commitment
The third iteration of onboarding was driven by a broader evolution of the coaching model itself. Rather than asking users to select goals from a fixed list and enter a predefined coaching journey, the experience shifted towards understanding users before defining their path.
After sign up, users were guided through a series of targeted questions exploring their current priorities, responsibilities and professional challenges. Responses were then used to generate a personalised coaching pathway designed around their context and intended outcomes.
This personalised approach extended throughout the experience. Users were introduced to a pathway aligned with their goals, given clearer expectations around the coaching model and matched with a specific Career Champion before booking their first Check-in. Coach introductions through personal videos or written profiles helped make the experience feel more human and reduced uncertainty around who users would be working with.
Rather than asking users to commit to an unknown experience, the onboarding journey began introducing coaching as a relationship shaped around individual needs and circumstances.
This represented a broader shift in thinking: personalisation was no longer being treated as an additional layer within onboarding, but as the foundation of the coaching journey itself.
Outcomes
While multiple factors influenced performance across launches and product iterations, early pilot data suggested that introducing greater ownership and personalisation throughout the coaching journey helped create stronger engagement signals.
Recent launches achieved first Check-in booking rates of between 80–92%, with some cohorts showing particularly strong continuation behaviour after completing their first session. In one pilot, 89% of users who completed their first Check-in went on to book another session. User feedback also remained consistently positive, with average Check-in ratings above 4.8 and NPS scores above 80.
More importantly, the nature of user feedback shifted. Rather than expressing uncertainty around coaching, users increasingly described feeling understood, supported and clearer about how the experience related to their own goals.
Although onboarding alone was not responsible for these outcomes, the project reinforced an important learning: building trust was not simply about providing more information — it required designing an experience that felt personally relevant from the very beginning.
Contact me at