SaaS onboarding flow · 2025

Setting up a clinic in one sitting

A rebuilt onboarding that starts from the clinic's real week instead of an empty calendar: import or sketch your hours, add one practitioner, send one test booking, and only then see the full product.

Client: Relaykit
By: Priya Natarajan
Timeline: 8 weeks
Year: 2025

A desktop onboarding screen with a four step checklist and a weekly hours grid — Fig. 01 / 05Step one: paint the clinic's real week.

The problem

Clinics signed up for Relaykit's scheduling tool and stalled before adding their first practitioner. Most never booked a single patient.

My role

Senior product designer, onboarding squad

Constraints

Health data rules meant no sample patient data could appear anywhere in the product.
The setup had to work for a clinic manager on a shared front-desk computer.
Engineering could build one new screen type; everything else reused existing components.

Decision 01

Mapped where clinics stalled

Reviewed forty session recordings of new clinics, with names and patient data hidden by the tool.

Why

The funnel showed where people left. The recordings showed why: an empty calendar with eleven settings tabs.

A funnel diagram of the old onboarding showing the drop at the empty calendar — Fig. 02 / 05The old funnel, with the empty calendar where most clinics stopped.

Decision 02

Started from the clinic's real hours

Step one asks for opening hours with a drag-to-paint week, not a settings form.

Why

Every manager we spoke to could describe their week in seconds; nobody could describe their "booking rules".

Wireframes of the new onboarding checklist in gray boxes — Fig. 03 / 05Wireframes for the four-step checklist.

Decision 03

Made the first booking the finish line

Onboarding ends when a test booking lands in the manager's own inbox.

Why

Seeing a booking arrive is the moment the product makes sense, so we moved it from week two to minute ten.

A test booking confirmation arriving in an email inbox — Fig. 04 / 05The finish line: a test booking in the manager's own inbox.

Three empty state illustrations for calendar, practitioners, and messages — Fig. 05 / 05Empty states that tell you the next step instead of showing nothing.

The outcome

Released to new signups in June 2025. Priya reports that the share of clinics completing a first real booking within seven days went from 22% to 47%.

Next: Private residence, Providence, architecture renovation

An illustrative case study. Priya Natarajan and Relaykit are fictional, and so are the numbers, which stand in for figures a real designer would supply. Casepanorama never invents them.