Redesigning Twilio’s Onboarding Experience: What’s New

Redesigning Twilio’s Onboarding Experience: What’s New

At Twilio, builder experience is priority #1. From the moment you signup, you’re handed the keys, phone numbers, and credits to explore and create. Our builder-first approach lets you prototype without roadblocks, deferring credit card and compliance requirements until you’re ready to launch.

Many users come to Twilio with a clear vision for what they want to build, but building compliant, scalable communication systems can be complex. We understand that the initial learning curve might feel steep, which is why we shipped major improvements to the onboarding experience.

To simplify getting started, we streamlined the onboarding experience with three key objectives in mind:

• Start prototyping right away: Get a number and start building. We simplify compliance so you can test and prototype without sharing a credit card or upgrading.
• Create clear paths for common use cases: For builders who already know what they want to accomplish, our new onboarding experience offers personalized guidance to help achieve those goals efficiently.
• Reduce research time, accelerate building: We aim to get your account set up seamlessly without heavy reliance on documentation or support so you can start prototyping. We love our docs, but we’ve streamlined onboarding so you can read less and build more.

Here’s a closer look at what’s changed.

What’s new in Twilio’s onboarding?

Whether you came to Twilio to build two-factor authentication or set up appointment reminders, when you sign up, you’ll be guided step-by-step with personalized content based on your role, code preference, and use case.This personalized approach reduces guesswork, helps you build faster, and ensures your solution is built with best practices.

Start Right Away: Build with the Virtual Phone

We created a Virtual Phone in the console so that you can build your prototype, send messages, and see exactly how they will appear on your customers’ devices – no waiting for compliance registration.

When onboarding with Twilio, we provide you with a trial phone number to build your application and send messages. This trial number is assigned to your account and ready to use with Twilio APIs while you prototype and explore.In most countries, messaging a handset is restricted until registration is approved. However, with the Virtual Phone you can message a software-based handset that works over real APIs to avoid registration delays. This is possible because the Virtual Phone works in a sandboxed test environment where compliance can be deferred until you’re ready to message handsets. Since the Virtual Phone uses Twilio APIs, you can also debug issues with logs and Insights tools.

Send messages to the Virtual Phone without waiting for compliance approvals. Developers can trigger API calls to send messages via apps, IDEs, or the console interface.

Personalized paths per Use Case

A major highlight of Twilio’s new onboarding experience is creating personalized paths. Here are some of the new features that will help guide you through our platform as you get started:

A survey for a personalized experience

When you login to Twilio for the first time, you will encounter a brief and focused survey. This intake step allows Twilio to tailor a customized experience, so you can focus on your specific use case.

A personalized “For You” page tailored to your needs

After the survey, we’ll know more about your role (developer, business owner, product manager), code preference (code or no-code), and use case (what you came here to do). We use this information to help navigate our wide range of products (over 20!), and guide you to your goals.

The For You page is powered by a prioritization engine that personalizes guidance based on actions taken and survey answers shared. For example, if you’re focused on account notifications and looking to build with code, the personalized For You page will prioritize Notifications Use Case Tutorials, Engagement Suite features like Scheduling, and next steps for Compliance, like completing A2P Registration, to help you reach production faster.

If you’d prefer to build without code, the new onboarding experience connects you with partners to get started with solutions built on Twilio.

Relevant documentation at your fingertips

We’ve focused on making onboarding quicker and more welcoming for developers by embedding documents and guides in our use case-specific onboarding tutorials. Developers can now use embedded content to build, learn, and test all in one place, without searching across multiple tabs.

Reduce researching, accelerate building

Another major theme of our new onboarding experience is to reduce time researching and accelerate building. The following features will help you experience Twilio’s capabilities, instead of just reading about them.

Centralized configuration for testing and production

Configuring multiple features used to involve digging through multiple console pages and docs pages. But now, from a single screen, you can:

• Enable and configure features relevant to your use case
• Test your configurations with or without code and see live results instantly in the Virtual Phone
• Review API calls and message logs to quickly learn core concepts

Code Samples in the Console

Are you a developer and prefer code?

The new onboarding experience serves you pre-loaded code samples in all of our helper library languages. You can also copy sample code to test it with a terminal or an IDE, or link out to the relevant API reference page to learn more about the features available to you.

Save and Resume Your Progress

We understand that building apps isn’t always a linear journey. The new onboarding experience allows you to save your progress, revisit incomplete tutorials, and even manage multiple tutorials simultaneously. If you need help along the way, our support team is always here to assist you.

Next Steps

The new onboarding experience is now live to all new signups! Early results show that using the new onboarding experience delivers a 62% improvement in first message activation and a 33% improvement in production launches within 7 days compared to those users presented with the old onboarding experience, so you can launch sooner. Sign up, create a new account, and try it out for yourself!

As you start using Twilio, we’d love to hear your feedback. Please share your feedback to help us further improve the onboarding experience.

Let’s build together! 🚀

Maggie Jan is a results-driven program manager working on customer onboarding experiences at Twilio with a decade of experience with PaaS API companies. A former dev evangelist, data scientist, and optometrist, she is a product strategist with an eye for using analytics to enhance customer experiences and product outcomes.

Ranjeet Sidhu leads onboarding at Twilio, guiding developers from “Hello, World” to production. A former founder and consultant, he has more than a decade of experience building B2B software trusted by engineers and frontline teams across enterprises, governments, and nonprofits. He specializes in turning complex workflows into intuitive, engaging experiences.