Relay — First-Week Onboarding for an Analytics Platform
My summer UX internship project — an onboarding checklist that helps new trial users actually connect their data and see what the product can do.
Role
UX Design Intern
Timeframe
Team
Nina Alvarez — My design mentor at Relay
Ben Carter — Product manager who scoped the project with me
Kai Nakamura — Front-end engineer who helped me understand what was actually feasible to ship
Problem
During my summer UX internship at Relay, a small analytics startup, I was assigned to onboarding for new trial users. My mentor had noticed that a lot of people signed up but never connected their own data — which meant they never saw what the product could actually do before their trial ran out.
As my first task, I pulled together the existing analytics with my mentor and ran five quick user interviews with recent trial sign-ups (my first time interviewing actual customers, not classmates). A pattern showed up fast: the setup wizard felt long, and people bailed halfway through with no obvious way to pick it back up later.
One long, linear wizard with no way to skip ahead or come back.
No visible progress, so people didn't know how much was left.
Nothing to explore until every setup step was finished.
Challenge
This was my first time designing for a real, shipping product with real engineering constraints, and I only had twelve weeks. I had to quickly learn how Relay's product actually worked, how the team shipped features, and — probably the hardest part for me — how to explain and defend my design decisions to engineers in sprint planning.
Connecting a data source sometimes needed help from someone with database access, which meant I couldn't design this as a single flow — parts of it genuinely depended on someone else's schedule.
5 user interviews with recent trial sign-ups
A quick audit of onboarding flows from 4 competitor products
Weekly design reviews with my mentor and the engineering team
Solution
I designed an onboarding checklist that lives on the home screen for the whole trial period, instead of one long setup wizard. People can see every step up front and do them in any order, at their own pace.
A sample dashboard so people can explore the product before connecting their own data.
An “Invite a teammate” step for anyone who needs help with the technical setup.
A visible progress bar that stays on screen the whole trial, not hidden behind a modal.
I built the whole thing as a component set in Figma so the engineering team could hand off pieces incrementally, which was a new way of working for me — normally I'd just hand off one finished screen at a time.
Impact
The checklist shipped to a small group of new trial users near the end of my internship. In the first few weeks, more of those users connected a data source compared to users who didn't see the checklist. The team is still watching the longer-term numbers before rolling it out to everyone.
My biggest lessons from this internship: ask “dumb” questions early, share unfinished work sooner than feels comfortable, and a good engineering partner will make your design better if you actually listen to their constraints.
to a small group of new trial users before my internship wrapped up
Shipped
trial users who saw the checklist connected a data source more often than those who didn't
More setups
from my first research interview to handing designs off to engineering
12 weeks
