Rebuilding Design Onboarding Around the First Day
Scattered onboarding material became a shared day-one Figma experience, helping new designers see the organization and how their work fit together. In survey feedback, reported time to confidence shifted from 6–9 months to 3–6 months.
Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation
UX Manager and author of the design onboarding system
New designers joining the organization
Figma and new-hire feedback surveys
Design onboarding, separate from company-wide HR onboarding
Onboarding depended on the team someone joined
Designers were entering a complex organization with several platforms, disciplines, and ways of working. Onboarding material existed, but it was scattered across versions maintained by individual managers. A new hire could learn their immediate team’s practices without understanding how that team related to the rest of the organization.
That made onboarding a problem of context as well as access to information. Knowing where a file lived was useful, but designers also needed to understand who did what, which partners to involve, and how work moved between groups.
Survey feedback showed that new designers needed 6–9 months to feel comfortable. I used that experience as the starting point for rebuilding onboarding. My responsibility was to organize the material into a coherent introduction that a designer could use from the first day.
Consolidating the existing material
I gathered the scattered versions into one place. The consolidation produced a 20-page document, which made it possible to see the available content and the gaps between different versions.
That document was useful for the inventory, but it was not the final experience I wanted to give a new designer. The next step was to organize the information so people could understand its relationships, rather than work through a long collection of references.
I rebuilt the material in Figma, where designers already worked. The change gave onboarding a format connected to the team’s daily environment and created a single experience from material that had previously depended on the manager maintaining it.
Explaining the organization before the details
I structured the experience from the company level down to the individual designer’s work:
The company, its structure, and key roles.
The design organization and where the new hire’s team fit.
Ways of working, community activities, and recurring events.
The designer workflow and collaboration with research, UX writing, localization, and other specialists.
Tools and basic tutorials.
The order gave each practical detail a context. A tool list became more useful once someone understood the work and the people involved. The structure helped explain who to collaborate with as well as what to do.
Using feedback to improve the experience
I released the work in versions rather than waiting for a comprehensive system to be finished. The older material describes V1, V1.5, and V2, with each round shaped by feedback about where recent hires were getting stuck.
I used surveys and interviews to understand how comfortable people felt contributing. Completion of onboarding material and confidence in navigating the organization were different questions. The outcome measure focused on the latter.
That feedback helped keep the work connected to the experience of joining the team. It gave me a way to examine whether the information was useful beyond the fact that it had been assembled and made available.
Preparing the next version for a broader owner
I handed the next version to the design program managers. That moved the work beyond an onboarding experience maintained solely through my own involvement and gave the next iteration an organizational home.
The handoff was a completed part of my contribution. I do not treat it as proof that the next version was adopted across the organization, because that later adoption is not established in the project record.
What changed for new designers
New designers’ reported time-to-comfort moved from 6–9 months to 3–6 months, based on survey feedback. The result describes how people reported their experience of becoming comfortable; it is not a direct measure of productivity or a controlled estimate of the onboarding system’s effect.
The work replaced fragmented onboarding references with a shared day-one Figma experience and a clear information sequence. My contribution combined content consolidation, information architecture, iteration through new-hire feedback, and preparation for the next version’s ownership.