Voluum — Case study

Campaign Creation Wizard. Onboarding that teaches by doing.

Voluum's flows were built for experienced media buyers — and it showed. When onboarding calls were removed from basic plans, churn went up. The answer wasn't more documentation; it was a guided quick-start that walks users through a real setup.

Role

Product Designer — discovery, design, early development

Timeline

4 months

Tools

Figma · Hotjar · YouTrack · support analytics

Impact

−8% early churn after release

Voluum quick-start wizard — selecting a traffic source from known ad networks — The shipped quick-start — step two, choosing a traffic source. Familiar brands up front, full list on demand.

Context

Years of development had made Voluum Tracker powerful — and complex. Flows assumed deep knowledge of tracking concepts. Novice users, especially those without prior tracker experience, defaulted to trial and error for their first campaign, no matter how many tutorial videos existed.

Problem

The flow was built for experienced users, leaving beginners behind
First-time setup required too much prior knowledge
Removing onboarding calls from basic plans directly increased churn
Documentation wasn't flexible enough to cover diverse use cases

Evidence came from four directions: Hotjar session recordings, support ticket patterns, chat logs, and YouTrack reports. All pointed at the same wall — the first campaign.

Process & solution

Audited system request data to define every key component of campaign creation
Filtered with CS/AM teams for real-world usage patterns, not theoretical ones
Built a guided quick-start that mimics the actual setup process — learning by doing, not by reading
Progressive disclosure: defaults up front, complexity later
Inline explanations at each step, where confusion actually happens
Covered 80%+ of first-use scenarios in the initial flow design

The shipped flow walks a new user through seven steps — Start → Traffic source → Offer → Conversion → Campaign → Summary → Connections — mirroring a real campaign setup. No prior configuration needed: users arrive with nothing but an offer URL and leave with a working, trackable campaign link.

QuickStart's shipped entry screen — 'Set up a working campaign with QuickStart from scratch' with the four-step how-it-works diagram and the full wizard stepper — The shipped entry screen — the whole journey previewed before it starts, so users always know where they are and what's left.

Annotated design spec of the wizard's campaign step — defaults, dependencies and edge cases mapped per field — Design spec, campaign step — every default classified: set arbitrarily, dependent on earlier steps, or user input.

Wizard conversion-tracking step design — postback, pixel, or no tracking, with affiliate network templates — Conversion step — the hardest concept in tracking, reduced to three choices with templates for known networks.

Voluum's new-user starting point — QuickStart as a permanent entry in the side navigation next to a 'Where to begin?' checklist view — QuickStart earned a permanent slot in the side navigation, and the new-user home became a "Where to begin?" launchpad instead of an empty report.

Shipped — and public

QuickStart went live for all Voluum users, announced in the public changelog and documented as a self-served guide — "create a working campaign in one go without jumping between different screens."

Results

−8%reduction in first-month churn after release

21%of newcomers used the quick-start within their first 10 sessions

80%+of first-use scenarios covered by the initial flow

Onboarding sessions became shorter and more efficient
Highly positive feedback from users and internal teams
Core design and early development owned by me; final rollout transitioned to the maintenance team

Onboarding as product, not content — the quick-start removed friction inside the flow itself, turning the first session from a blocker into a launchpad.