NUX playbook
2.0
I built a 44-slide playbook so that any team — PD, Eng, UXR — could identify where content has the highest impact in a first-time device experience, and make that call without needing a content designer in the room.
A turf war in
the onboarding flow.
The smartwatch's onboarding experience had a turf war problem. Every feature team — health, notifications, messaging, camera — wanted their product included in the first-time setup flow. The onboarding experience was bloating because nobody had a framework for deciding what belongs in setup vs. what belongs later.
The experience teams and the platform team were in constant conflict about what should be mandatory, what should be optional, and what should happen after setup entirely. Without a decision framework, every conversation became a negotiation rather than a prioritization.
The root problem: "onboarding" meant different things to different teams. Some meant the first 5 minutes, others meant the first week. There was no shared vocabulary.
A shared vocabulary.
A decision framework.
I partnered with a product designer to create a decision framework — the NUX Playbook — that gave teams a common language and a set of principles for deciding where their content belongs in the new user experience.
I defined three distinct phases: Mandatory Setup (required before first use), Optional Setup (available during onboarding but skippable), and Ongoing Experience (post-setup education and discovery). Each phase had clear criteria for what belongs there and what doesn't.
I wrote principles to help product teams create consistent experiences while saving effort on the platform side. I contributed the principles and guidelines to the design system documentation. And I co-hosted weekly office hours with product designers to help teams apply the framework to their specific features.
A playbook that
replaced the argument.
Decision criteria for each onboarding phase — Mandatory Setup, Optional Setup, Ongoing Experience — with clear rules for what belongs where and why.
Principles and guidelines contributed to the design system documentation — so the framework lives in the team's operating infrastructure, not just a one-off deck.
Co-hosted weekly office hours that created a collaborative environment between platform and experience teams — a cadence that became permanent after the playbook launched.
170+ views in week one.
A new workstream spawned.
The playbook was referenced by 3+ products across the wearables portfolio. It eliminated a source of conflict between platform and experience teams — moving from "every team argues for their slot" to a shared decision model.
The "Ongoing Experience" concept I introduced became the basis for an entire team's work the following half. The office hours became a permanent fixture, creating a collaborative cadence between teams that hadn't existed before.
What I'd do differently: build metrics into the framework from the start. The playbook was widely adopted and clearly useful — but I couldn't quantify its impact on the actual onboarding experience because those metrics weren't instrumented. If I'd defined success metrics at the outset, I could have shown that the framework didn't just resolve team conflict but actually improved the user experience.
"She developed the NUX playbook and helped establish the mandatory and optional framework, which has been immensely valuable in anchoring content from various experience teams."
— Product manager"Aligning on a shared language is already proving really useful."
— Product manager"Your leadership in all the NUX work and also all the content magic in all our projects have been a crazy amount of help. I appreciate you so much."
— Product designer