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Noora Health · People Experience · 2023–Present

Onboarding, Rebuilt Around People

A nonprofit growing from 80 to 500 people, new joiners landing without a map, and a redesign that cut manager time ~60 percent.

My Role

Design Strategist

Timeline

2024

Methods

Diary Study · Journey mapping · Co-design

Team

Project Lead (me) · 1 Visual Designer · 1 Copywriter · 1 Editor

01 · Context

The Org Outgrew Its Own Welcome

Noora Health teaches families the skills to care for their own patients. While I have been there, the organisation grew from 80 to 500 people, and the frequency of onboarding grew with it. The old onboarding was designed for a personal touch at a much smaller scale. After the new operating model it had only seen makeshift patches, never an overhaul. The process needed revising end to end, with automation where the personal touch was not the point.

02 · Front Stage

What a New Joiner Actually Saw

A welcome email, a laptop, and a calendar full of names. No map of who does what, no sense of which conversations mattered in week one. Managers filled the gap by hand, every single time. I ran diary studies with recent joiners across three segments and pulse checks through their first weeks: the same broken welcome, seen from three different angles.

03 · Backstage

The Systems Behind the Welcome

The listening calls were only the entry point: mapping where onboarding actually happened, in side chats, repeated explanations, and documents nobody could find. The bigger half was the build. We put backend structures and processes in place that teams open the moment a call starts: presenter toolkits so anyone can run their session ready then and there, guides for the smaller touchpoints in between, and the SOP library I contributed to. Backstage here meant building what the teams needed to work and collaborate better, not just documenting how they worked.

04 · The Moment of Truth

The First Week, Designed on Purpose

The call that shaped it: onboarding could not depend on any one person's calendar. I split it into three parts, pre, operational, and organisational, moved the repeatable parts to video, and killed the speaker dependency that made 16 live calls the bottleneck. Every new joiner got a structured first week. Managers got a repeatable system instead of a memory test, and their time in onboarding dropped 60 to 70 percent.

05 · The Product

The Tool It Became

The onboarding work grew into an employee experience platform, built 0 to 1: one place for every HR touchpoint, a query management system underneath, AI-assisted workflows throughout. Discovery research with employees and HR, service mapped across both sides. Launching now.

06 · The Research Lane

In Parallel, the Caregiving Lab

Alongside People Experience, I research in the Caregiving Lab: core researcher on Project Marlin, a field study of caregiver experience in life-threatening illness, with in-home depth interviews across urban Bangalore and rural Karnataka, and part of Caregiving Conversations, joined after its research phase to translate the findings into a library and an immersive audio-visual experience. The action research in Haryana became its own story, told separately.

07 · Outcomes

~60%

less manager time in onboarding

16 Videos

Easier Access to overview

Visual Theme

the organisation it now fits

08 · Reflection

Start listening earlier. Next time the listening calls begin in week one, not month three. The teams already knew where onboarding was broken. They were waiting to be asked.
The maps people give you are cleaner than the work. Teams waved off the granular steps as not worth mapping, and those were exactly the steps doing the quiet heavy lifting: the repetitions, the workarounds, the fixes nobody had named. Now I go looking for whatever a team calls unimportant, first.
Every function had a stake. Onboarding touched all sixteen teams, which made this the most interdependent thing I have run. Most of what I know about stakeholder management across an organisation, I learned here.

Start listening earlier. Next time the listening calls begin in week one, not month three. The teams already knew where onboarding was broken. They were waiting to be asked.
The maps people give you are cleaner than the work. Teams waved off the granular steps as not worth mapping, and those were exactly the steps doing the quiet heavy lifting: the repetitions, the workarounds, the fixes nobody had named. Now I go looking for whatever a team calls unimportant, first.
Every function had a stake. Onboarding touched all sixteen teams, which made this the most interdependent thing I have run. Most of what I know about stakeholder management across an organisation, I learned here.

Didn't own: HR policy ·

Worked with: visual designer · copywriter · editor · people ops · 16 team leads & Members

Owned: research · onboarding structure · presenter toolkits · the product build

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Onboarding, Rebuilt Around People