Onboarding personalisation lessons from Canva

It’s the 7th year of profitable growth for Canva. Let’s see why

I remember the days when Canva was this cool new design tool for non-designers to make snazzy designs. I used it when I was in a rush and didn’t have a designer to help me.

Now, there’s 200 Canva designs created every second.

Every. Single. Second.

How time flies.

Founded back in 2012, the B2B Saas tool is now in its 7th consecutive year of profitability (rare these days...). In October 2022, the Co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins, said:

“It took nearly three years for us to reach the milestone of one million people using Canva, and another two years after that for us to hit ten million. Today, reaching the milestone of more than one hundred million people using Canva every month still feels incredibly surreal.”

Fast forward two more years, Canva now has 170 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) and grew Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) 100% year-on-year last year to one billion.

Source: Reflecting on 2023: Canva’s 10th and biggest year yet

One thing that makes Canva stick out is how well they personalise the experience for the huge range of customers that can get value from the product.

The second thing is how they’ve layered on product-led growth with sales-led tactics, having recently reported that they’re now used by more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Wow.

Here, we’ll look at onboarding personalisation specifically (and leave the product and sales-led growth for another day..). We’ll analyse how the business uses a range of personalisation mechanisms in the early UX flows from landing page to onboarding to home, all aimed at improving activation and (I suspect) conversion to subscriber.

First stop, Canva.com

1. A broad but specific landing page

The most common mistake on landing pages is trying to do too much for too many people at once.

It is a really hard thing to do well. Founders often get caught up here as they don’t want to miss out on business, but end up confusing everyone due to fluffy messaging and decision paralysis.

Typically for early stage it makes sense to be hyper specific to a niche audience.

Not Canva. The first page you see on Canva.com manages to convey value to a range of audiences with very little copy.

Some things I like:

• Not a lot of text (one line for header and one for sub-header)— this is an imagery-led landing page
• Monetisation is high up and just visible below the fold, encouraging the scroll and adding an angle of clarity and transparency
• CTAs are clear in their primary purple: Sign up, Sign up for Free
• The carousel of imagery communicates the range of designs available, likely to speak to a range of customers (keeps it broad, but manages to be specific)
• Header starts as a question, feels like its opening your mind to the creative possibilities with Canva

And — my favourite — the micro copy within the designs is genius:

Present with ease

Perfect your post

Design websites

With this, the page looks clean but subtly manages to communicate value.

So, I tap sign up and get to registration.

2. Easy registration

Not much to comment on with registration, which is great.

It should be frictionless. Here we have a small number of registration methods: Google, Facebook, Email. I imagine Canva analysed the most common options and went with those to reduce the Paradox of Choice.

Two fears and anxieties are also effectively covered in the copy:

• How long will this take me?

Title: Log in or sign up in seconds

• Do I have to pay to use this?

Subtitle: Use your email or another service to continue with Canva it’s free!

Sweet. I’m in.

If I tap ‘continue another way’, I can see that the first screen was hiding the complexity of their full list with eight registration options.

Again, a great way to personalise without overwhelming users.

The other fun thing about these screens again is the micro copy within the image.

Design with ease

I almost feel as if I’m being slowly hypnotised — most people won’t consciously register this copy. When I noticed it, I actually found it quite funny.

It also shows how easy Canva is — this person has no mouse, no snazzy design set up. A normal size Mac. If you look super closely she’s also collaborating with two people on the file.

Smart.

Following through to log in with email, I see the same image on the right with the blonde woman and ‘design with ease’ while the white module on the left changes with the registration steps.

Feels seamless, friendly and helpful in the copy, and clear with the defaults used in free text entry fields.

Now onto the fun part: personalisation.

3. Onboarding Personalisation

I come to a screen with six options for me to self-select into a user cohort: non-profit, large company, teacher, personal, student & small business.

Interestingly, I tested this a few times and the order of the boxes changes — unsure whether they always change or if it’s a test. Perhaps the lazy users out there just pick the first block, so changing it up will help unskew the results.

3 things that I like about this step:

• The copy is helpful
• The copy tells you why they’re asking for your input
• The copy is super super personal — as if they’ve taken it straight from the persona’s mouth

Words like ‘greater good’ for non profits, ‘from the ground up’ for small businesses and ‘keep your brand consistent’ for the big bizzness make the UX feel so personalised and personal at the same time.

Then, when I tap through to each, I’m taken on a completely different journey, ranging from 2 to 5+ screens before I hit the home page, depending on my cohort.

Let’s go through them one-by-one

(And yes, this took me ages).

Cohort 1: Charities

Tapping non profit, I’m instantly pushed to Canva for free, with imagery that is personalised with various social posts, posters and charity campaigns.

Again, the micro copy is excellently done: ‘let’s get our way’, ‘empower’, ‘together we are a force for good’ etc.

I’m left feeling motivated for the greater good.

Tapping ‘get started’ I’m asked to verify my non profit. Now, I went quite far through this but not all the way, given I don’t work for a registered charity it was tricky to test.

Small UI details like the numbered pages tells me that this is a four-step application process.

The whole way through my exit is clear too, which I appreciate. A visible, dark-grey button top right labelled ‘skip’.

Right, next cohort.

Cohort 2: Teachers

Tapping ‘Teacher’ I get through to a single choice question about what level I teach at. There’s the tailored value proposition for teachers too:

Our mission is to support educators and students at every level

Heartwarming. Moving on.

If I tap primary or secondary, I’m pushed to claim Canva for free.

If I tap higher ed or ‘somewhere else’ I get pushed to the marketing consent and email opt in, nicely titled

Can we send you amazing things?

I didn’t find the imagery as personalised here as the charities one, but I do like the emphasis on stationary: ruler, compass, 4 purple pencils and a cute pen, which does remind me of school.

Cohort 3: Students

Teachers and students are same same but different.

Tapping the button I see the copy:

You’re here to impress your teachers and classmates

Then I see the same imagery on the first screen as for teachers: the compass and ruler.

There’s an education level selector:

• Vocational training
• University
• Professional Development
• High School

Tapping high school sends me to redeem Canva for Education for free, with a tailored image and a kid’s headshot and the background removed (hands-down one of their best features).

Within the bullet list of features on this screen, the copy and tone of voice shine:

Use our coolest features

Sounds exactly like what a kid may say (and me too tbh).

Then the features called out are ‘magic resize’, ‘background remover’ and animations’ — I wonder if they’ve analysed which features students use most and pulled these out as a result.

Lastly, the copy says ‘collaborate with your friends and classmates’, encouraging the sharing and network effects.

Tapping any of the other options on the initial screen take me to the email opt in, as before.

And as always, I can exit easily on every screen. No size 8 font skip button in a hard-to-read colour.

Cohort 4: Individual User

Tapping on ‘personal’ I’m taken to a two-module screen that allows me to select whether I’m an individual user or a team.

Tapping on either takes me to a paywall that is tailored in 3 ways:

1. The heading changes from Try Canva Pro for Free to Start your Free Trial
2. The social proof changes from a senior leader at Hubspot with no avator to ‘Megan Kelley’ from upworth, with no title but with an avatar
3. Lastly, the teams version is transparent about the team pricing in the drop downs

Both paywalls have a clear exit button, as well as a timeline of how the trial work. The whole experience feels simple, transparent and builds trust.

And it very similar to the flow for small businesses.

Cohort 5: Small business

So this flow is pretty much identical. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t always this way. I managed to find a test on this pro vs. teams screen.

I actually started writing this article at the end of last year, then got too busy. When I came back to it in March I thought ‘better check the screens are still the same’.

And they weren’t, and I was thrilled.

It is so cool to see what companies are testing, then try to reverse engineer what their hypothesis might have been.

So, what changed?

1. Canva now gives people the choice
2. Much less copy
3. No image

I imagine there wasn’t space for the image: two options versus one necessitates less complexity in the feature list (to avoid over-doing it). So 2 and 3 I get.

As for 1, perhaps people struggle to define themselves as a small business versus an individual / personal. What is a small business? Do I even have a business?

All these existential questions.

Perhaps people self-select into what they think they class as and then Canva redirects them to the best product for them.

Start with: small business versus individual.

End with: are you one personal or a team.

And hey ho, you land in the right place.

Both of these however, are very different from large companies.

Cohort 6: Large Business

The first thing you’re pushed to if you tap ‘large company’ is a screen than focuses on teams, collaboration and encourages network effects.

The imagery is personalised here, my first thought was that it look like collaboration on Figma — the OG of B2B Saas collaboration. There’s also subtle meaning behind the image, it is showing:

• 3 stakeholders working on the same file
• 2 types of fonts
• 3 types of imagery

I’m now getting flashbacks to long comments on Figma and threads on slack discussing how far ad designs stray from the brand, or difficulty accessing the company fonts….

In the copy on this screen, there’s two key value propositions communicated over and over: collaboration and consistency of brand.

Features pulled out in the list include adding brand assets, access to all templates and time-saving tools. All important for big businesses who can be slowed down by resource bottlenecks, layers of sign off and slow processes.

Again, the messaging and copy hits the nail on the head for this cohort; their needs, their pains and what they need from a design tool.

4. Home Screen Experience

Going through each flow perhaps mistakenly makes you feel that the process was long, but it didn’t feel that way.

The easy navigation back and forth between onboarding steps was seamless, and all-in-all the max screens from registration to home was around 5–6.

Getting to home still felt good. Especially as I was met with some cute confetti (will it ever get old? Probs not.)

A subtle thing I just noticed is the header:

What will you design today?

It is exactly the same as the landing page. Feels like we’ve come round in a full, neat, tidy circle.

There is a lot going on in this homepage. But the purple/blue draws me into search, or if I’m stuck some pre-filled templates ‘for you’.

Easy to set up, easy to get started. Gives you options but also guides you.

An experience that is actually quite hard to do.

Zooming out: the full flows

After getting deep into all the personalised flows, I felt the need to zoom out and map it all out.

We saw:

• A frictionless log in
• 6 different personalised personas
• 11 different sub personas
• A clear exit button throughout
• Personalised paywalls
• Personalised subscription tiers for charity, school, individuals, small bizz and big bizz
• Personalised social proof

So, what can we take away? Well here’s 5 key things.

5 Onboarding Personalisation Lessons from

1. Let the imagery do the work when you’re trying to target multiple personas — words get heavy
2. Call out the fears and anxieties during sign up, and tackle them head on
3. Copy is key: make sure you understand what tone of voice lands with each cohort and use language that users would use themselves
4. Contextualise paywalls: who are you quoting in the social proof? Is that someone that the target audience on that page would identify with?
5. Personalise the imagery in each journey and use micro copy within images to avoid a busy page and subtly communicate the value propositions of the product

Have you seen any cool examples of personalisation lately?