The screen every MAIA customer sees first, before they've touched anything else on the platform.
End-to-end: research, flow architecture, high-fidelity UI, design system contribution.
Three Explicit Next Steps, Not One Drop-Off
3: Next steps instead of 1 dead end
Scope, Constraints & Reality
MAIA underlies multiple downstream products, T-Cloud among them. Onboarding had to read as generic infrastructure a new hire could land on regardless of which specific app brought them there, not framed around any one product's vocabulary.
MAIA routes access requests to application owners, it can't approve them itself. The flow had to stay honest about approved / denied / pending states rather than implying access is instant, which shaped the entire post-request screen.
A returning admin setting up their fifth new hire shouldn't be forced through the same 13-step guided tour as someone's actual first login. Skip is available at every step, not just at the start.
A 10-week engagement shared across two other in-flight MAIA workstreams. Scoped tightly to the onboarding and first-run tour, not a redesign of the dashboard or applications views those flows land on.
New operators were dropped into a full enterprise dashboard with nothing in it. Access is granted in ServiceNow, not MAIA, so nothing could tell a new user which applications were theirs.
Three choices that shaped the first session: stepped portfolio configuration, a contextual virtual tour that overlays the live dashboard, and smart resource discovery.
A 13-step guided walkthrough that never leaves the live dashboard. It plays on first login, stays re-accessible from Help, and is skippable at every step.
Four pages, one grammar: clear headers, meaningful counts, and one filter model (Application, Platform, Account, Manage) reused on every table.
Built for density, speed and operator clarity: trust signals first, progressive disclosure, and every count carrying a route to the thing it counts.
Design Decisions
Three Explicit Next Steps, Not One Drop-Off
Finishing the access-request wizard used to dump the user straight onto an empty dashboard with nothing to look at yet. Configuration Complete now offers three concrete next moves instead: take the guided tour, browse developer tools, or open the resource library, so "you're done" doesn't read as a dead end.
The Empty Dashboard Says So
Before access is approved, the dashboard showed the same layout as after, just with every widget silently reading zero. Indistinguishable from a broken page. It now explicitly states access is pending, so an empty state reads as expected, not as a bug report waiting to happen.
Reference Team Member as a First-Class Step
New users rarely know their own access needs precisely enough to self-serve confidently. Letting them name an existing team member as a reference, surfaced as its own onboarding step rather than a buried optional field, gives approvers real context instead of a blind request.
Impact
Configuration Complete's tour / dev tools / resource library split replaced a single silent redirect to an empty dashboard.
Every tour step carries its own Skip control, so it never becomes a tax on someone who's onboarded before.
The pre-access dashboard states plainly that access is pending instead of rendering the same widgets with silently zeroed-out values.