Onboarding for HubSpot Shopify app

To understand the experience of a user installing the Shopify app for the first time, I documented the installation journey.

The current experience fell short in that it provided the user little context around the features of the app after installation (only the app listing page had feature information, pre-install). The feature discovery tab in the settings page had cards specifying the features but it was a disjointed experience that had low volume of clicks.

What I wanted to retain from the current experience, was the easy way to enter the object syncing wizard, which was a huge part of the app (to be able to sync Shopify objects to HubSpot objects). The user can access this from the settings at any time, but being directed to the wizard upon install was key to getting the object syncing up and running.

Based on prior customer research (done by the team's UX researcher), it was clear that users (especially newer ones) were unsure of all the available integration features and felt they needed an expert for proper use.

These features needed to be surfaced in a contextual manner for our e-commerce users to drive activation and adoption, by creating informative experiences and resources that help new users learn how to use the app.

Based on the customer feedback and business needs, the persona I was solving for was a user (typically marketers) who has just installed the Shopify integration and is newer to the HubSpot ecosystem.

HubSpot's Growth team had released a Product Led Growth (henceforth referred to as PLG) library with components and patterns for different use cases, along with guidelines on usage.

In this project I was primarily looking at new users of the integration, with the caveat that they might also be newer to HubSpot too. In terms of our goal, it was primarily to give them an overview / show them the value, but we also wanted to highlight how they can use it - so somewhere between the first two scenarios. I then weighed the pros and cons of all the different patterns as shown below.

Based on the above analysis, I explored the demo mode and guided tour further, and landed on the demo mode as it fulfilled our design goal of showing the customer a quick overview better, and was more scalable to other integrations in the future if needed.

A key component to the demo mode pattern performing well, based on the Growth team experiments, was crafting a compelling narrative. A customer new to the product, needed concrete examples of how it would help their business, all crafted into a cohesive story. The content was key here, and I used a story of an e-commerce shop owner selling computer accessories, and incrementally showing how the app can supercharge their business.

Another important design decision was the entry point for the onboarding flow and how it would be discovered.

I then explored having different launch points from the settings page with varying visual treatments.

After presenting the options to the team, we aligned on the secondary button callout in the settings page header as it was the cleanest option, eye catching enough to compel users to click but non intrusive for the data syncing flow.

Below is the proposed flow for the Shopify demo mode. I led weekly discussions with the engineering team and iterated quickly with them to evolve and finalize these designs. On every page, the focus was highlighting only the elements that were important, and making sure the story told through the demo mode progressed in an intuitive way, starting from where the Shopify data was going to (orders), to deep diving into one engagement email use case, and finally finishing up with an easy way to get started with the analytics. The aim was not to have every feature of the integration, but to help users get started.

Upon completion of the demo mode, customer satisfaction was tracked with the feedback survey (happy / neutral / unhappy with an optional open text field) to assess how customers felt about the demo mode. Users appreciated the clarity and brevity of the demo, frequently labeling it as “short and sweet.” On the flip side, there was a desire for more comprehensive guidance on setting up email flows and mapping previous deals to new systems, and desiring more depth of onboarding details provided. Users showed interest in additional resources, such as video tutorials or interactive elements to enhance understanding. The CSAT scores below are as of Q3 2026.

I worked closely with the product analyst to define the success metrics to track for this project.

Early activation data showed demo mode users activating at roughly 6x the rate of non-users, but volumes were too low to be conclusive, so we treated it as a signal to keep monitoring.

This project was well received by the product group leadership and the broader team for its iterative, thoughtful experimental approach - here's a snapshot of some of the feedback received.