Overview

This is a smaller-scale epic focused on improving the user experience during onboarding and ensuring it is intuitive for new members. This will be done through a combination of code changes and language / content changes on the onboarding, but our primary objective is to design a flow that makes it very obvious to users what they need to do next at each step.

Stakeholders

Product Stakeholder: @naishahmistry
Software Stakeholder: @chpy04 @walker-sean
Reference Users: Will Laroche

User Story

As a new member in the club, I want to have a comprehensive onboarding page that contains all the information that I need to know what to do next, so that I do not have to reach out to people to complete onboarding steps, and I am never waiting for someone to tell me what to do next.

Success Metrics

We will know if these changes are effective by looking at attrition rates for onboarding. The ratio of people who finish onboarding to those who make an account on finishline is a direct metric that should be used to track the success.

Rollout Plan

This epic combines simple code fixes/language changes and content updates with new pages/workflow steps. The simple changes that are low effort, high value should be prioritized and go live before onboarding starts for Spring 2026, while the larger additions, such as new pages and workflow steps, should be designed and implemented during the Spring 2026 semester and rolled out before Fall 2026 onboarding

Out of Scope

This epic does not include changing the language in the content of onboarding (other than "application" if we decide to change that).

Background / Context

We already have an onboarding process, but we saw a lot of people get confused by its purpose and either not use it or get stuck without reaching out for help and leave the club entirely. We want it to be clearer to people what they need to do and accelerate the process of getting people doing actual work in the club.

Acceptance Criteria & Mock-ups

• The checkboxes are very lagging right now because they don't change until the backend request goes through. Checking a box should be instant (as soon as the box is clicked, it changes right away instead of waiting for the request to go through)
• The top level checkboxes are not meant to be clicked, so they should be visually distinct from the other check boxes and should not look clickable. Clicking them should not do anything whether they are checked or unchecked (right now checking them always just gives an error saying there are unchecked items and unchecking them unchecks all of the child items which is just annoying and would be better to just fully disable the parent check boxes)
• Right now, checklist content consists of a list of checkbox items on the left and then a description on the right. Instead of this, we want the description to be mixed in with the checkboxes in a single combined list, so that we can utilize the full width of the component for both the descriptions and the tasks. In the admin tools under a specific task, the add subtask button should instead say add subtask or information, and clicking it should first prompt the user whether they want to add a checkbox item or a information block. The information block should use a similar form to what the current discription uses, including the markdown viewer. Discriptions and sub tasks in the onboarding page should be displayed as a vertical stack with all items taking up the full width of the task component.
• In the admin tools, the order of tasks and the order of subtasks / info blocks within a task should be adjustable by dragging and dropping with the dots on the left side, and should change the database so that the order is reflected on the frontend
• All links in the onboarding page should open a new tab always, including both external and finishline links

Tickets

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