Case Study Three: New Employee Onboarding

Challenge

A new employee's first week comes with a lot of uncertainty. Where do I find this? Who do I ask? How do I request time off? What am I supposed to do today? And what if I forget something?

The challenge was to create an onboarding experience that answered those questions without adding another overwhelming list of information.

The goal was to help employees understand what to expect, find essential resources, complete common first-week tasks, and feel confident navigating their new workplace.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the experience, learners will be able to:

• Given a common first-week workplace scenario, locate the appropriate resource or point of contact.

• Complete a time-off request using the simulated employee portal without guided assistance.

• Identify the key tasks and deadlines expected during their first week.

Solution

I designed a 10-15 minute interactive onboarding experience for BrightPath Solutions, a fictional organization.

Rather than asking new employees to remember where everything is, I designed the experience so they could practice finding and using the resources they'd need in their first week.

Learners begin with a first-week timeline, explore a simulated employee portal, learn how to submit a time-off request, practice finding the right resource, and respond to realistic workplace support scenarios.

The experience also includes an interactive first-week checklist that learners can use as a reference beyond the course itself.

Why I designed it this way

Onboarding can easily become an information dump: policies, procedures, systems, names, resources, and expectations all presented at once.

I wanted to take a different approach. Instead of asking learners to memorize where to find everything, I gave them opportunities to find it, use it, and make decisions about where to go for help.

The experience follows a "welcome, explore, demonstrate, practice, decide, assess" progression.

Learners first get oriented to their first week, then explore a simulated employee portal and practice completing a common task. From there, realistic workplace scenarios ask them to decide which resource or person can help them.

The goal is to make the course feel less like a list of information and more like a guided introduction to navigating a new workplace.

Tools

Articulate Storyline 360, Vyond, Canva

Design Considerations

Reduce cognitive load: I broke information into smaller, focused sections and used a first-week timeline to help learners understand what matters now versus what can wait.

Just-in-time resources: The checklist and resource guidance give learners something they can return to after completing the course rather than expecting them to remember everything.

Practice in context: The simulated employee portal and workplace scenarios let learners practice common tasks before they need to complete them immediately.

Learner control: Learners can explore the experience at a comfortable pace while keeping navigation predictable and intuitive.

Approachable tone: Onboarding is often someone's first formal learning experience with an organization, so I wanted the visual and written tone to feel welcoming rather than overly corporate.

Purposeful interaction: Layers, states, and triggers were used when they supported the learning, not simply to make the course more interactive.

Reflection

The project reinforced for me that good onboarding isn't about telling new employees everything they need to know. It's about helping them feel capable of finding their way.

A new employee will inevitably encounter questions that weren't covered in the onboarding course. Designing for that reality meant giving learners not only information, but also the confidence and resources to figure out what to do next.

If this were implemented in a real organization, I'd want to evaluate whether the experience reduced time-to-productivity and repetitive first-week questions while also looking at longer-term measures such as early retention and employee confidence.

If I expanded the project, I'd add more opportunities for learners to navigate unfamiliar situations independently and perhaps introduce a searchable resource they could continue using after the formal onboarding experience.