Case Study

Trial Onboarding

Trial Onboarding is the path from a first visit to the website to a working Cloudaware trial. I reworked every step of it: made the trial visible on the site, simplified sign-up, rebuilt the mandatory onboarding step and made it easier to connect a cloud account.

The problem

The path from the first visit to a working trial was problematic at every step.

The site almost never said the product had a free trial — visitors did not realize they could try it on their own, without contacting sales, and got lost before even signing up. The sign-up form did not help either: extra steps and an unclear CTA filtered out part of the interested leads right at the door.
The trial is built on top of Salesforce, an architectural constraint: the product cannot let users straight in, and a mandatory onboarding step sits between sign-up and the product itself. This is where a significant share of self-serve users dropped off — those who came on their own and expected instant access but hit an extra barrier instead.
Getting a trial requires granting access to cloud account data — a sensitive step by nature. For many it became a reason to stop right at the threshold, especially if the person who started the trial did not even have the rights to grant such access inside their company.

Altogether, this meant low conversion of marketing traffic into a real trial and lost self-serve leads.

How I solved it

A visible trial and a shorter path

I made the trial visible and reworked the path itself. I added clear messaging about the free trial at key points of the site and simplified sign-up: I removed extra steps, making the path from click to trial start shorter and clearer.

Show value right away

The main hypothesis: keep the user inside and show the product's value before they get distracted. Instead of leaving users alone at the mandatory onboarding step, I built a demonstration of the product's concrete benefits into that moment and guided them forward step by step, rather than leaving them alone with a form.

Demo as an alternative path

In parallel, I offered an alternative path — a demo right inside the product, the company’s main conversion channel — for those who were not ready to continue self-serve at this step. This way, such users moved into the demo instead of leaving.

Cloud account access

The barrier around cloud account access was removed. The key solution is a trial through Oracle Cloud: cloud credentials are not required upfront and are requested only at the trial stage itself. In addition, an option was added to pass access to a more relevant colleague, in case the person who started the trial lacks the necessary rights, and the process was personalized: every user is assigned a personal manager they can quickly reach about connecting their infrastructure.

Mentoring

I brought a designer from marketing into the project so that, on a real task, I could pass on the principles and fundamentals of product design: how to run analysis, build flows and CJMs, formulate hypotheses and check them against funnel metrics, think through states and scenarios, prepare designs for engineering handoff, and defend design decisions in front of the team.