DIGITAL LEGACY CLINIC
ONBOARDING PROGRAM DESIGN
The Digital Legacy Clinic is an innovative non-profit initiative launched by University of Colorado Boulder (CU) students to tackle end of life planning for accounts and data.
This semester marked the first full run of the Digital Legacy Clinic following its launch. With only a few returning students, the new cohort of clinic members was onboarded through inherited materials and informal practices from the pilot phase. In response to the new members’ feedback, the “Onboarding team” came together to clarify, consolidate, and rework these clinic materials into a more intentional and structured program.
DLC Knowledge Loss & HIGH Turnover
The onboarding team was created to address high turnover in the clinic, which runs as a semester-long course with students joining and leaving frequently. Since students can take the class up to four times, each semester brings a mix of experience levels. Without a consistent onboarding process, important knowledge—technical and normative—easily gets lost.
DELIVERABLES BRAINSTORM & PROJECT TRACKERGOALS:
DESIGN TWO WEEK CLASS ITINERARYPRODUCE TRAINING MATERIALS DOCUMENTING INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE 
INTERVIEWS & DEBRIEF NOTES:
MARCH 4, 2025
EARLY RESOURCE MAP & CLASS ITINERARY 
TEAM MEMBERS: Myself, Ryan, Chaltu, Alyx, and Jack MY ROLE AS A RETURNER
As someone who has been a member of the clinic since the first semester, I have a bit of a unique role on the onboarding team. I and one other member, Jack, are one of a few students who participated in both the launch of the clinic and continued onto the next semester. We had the advantage of knowing anything that would be documented for the deliverables we wanted to develop.
The real sucess of that documentation comes from the other three members of the team, all of whom were new members who had just recently completed the original onboarding experience just this semester. Their critique and role on the team was invaluable in making sure that what we created was legible and meaningful for fresh eyes to the clinic!
FIRST SPRINT:
LOFI DELIVERABLES
CLINIC DIAGRAMS & DELIVERABLES NOTES & RESOURCES INTERVIEWING EXPERTS: OUR NEW MEMBERS
This project came at a critical moment: the clinic’s second semester. It was our this first generation of new members who identified that the early weeks of the semester were a high-friction period.
When the project first started, we conducted structured interviews to better understand their experience. Our team prepared an exhaustive list of topics and specific resources that could be covered and developed for a potential new onboarding program, and asked new members in a semi-structured setting two key questions:
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PROJECT SCOPE:
The main goal was to equip new clinic members with a structured, interactive onboarding program that gives them the knowledge, skills, and context needed to hit the ground running within the first two weeks. Much of our work will be focused on developing and collecting comprehensive resources (i.e., timeline diagrams, software user guides, and ticket handling activities) to give new members something to lean on as they work towards understanding key systems and clinic workflows.
CRITIQUE DAY!
My biggest challenge throughout this project was tuning my language and explanations of the clinic in these deliverables to something that was truly legible for fresh ears. I’d become so used to the internal processes that, on paper, I made a number of little assumptions about what was known. That was the most common comment across my deliverables.
We had fellow clinic members go around the room and write their critiques, questions, and comments on sticky notes. Then, they revisited the stickynotes, and voted on the ones they agreed with the most by placing stickers. We later collected all the critiques, and discussed with other teams the ideas and suggestions they had for our project.
SECOND SPRINT:
MID-FI DELIVERABLES
The prototypes began to really take shape in the second iteration. By this point, we had already wire-framed the ideas, and in sharing them with each other were able to roll out obvious errors.
The deliverables I focused on were a module/resource map, describing how each of the deliverables would link together and be interacted with, as well as a timeline for a weekly responsibilities cycle for the average clinic member, and a loose timeline of the class’s responsibilities through the semester.
The single standalone resource I wrote was a document explaining how to best write emails as a clinic member—one of the core responsibilities of any student answering tickets in the clinic. The document covers both the technical, step-by-step process of what to reference and how to write responses, as well as the expectations and norms that shape how clinic members should approach ticket communication. These norms were established during the clinic’s very first semester, when the founding cohort focused heavily on service design and deliberately shaped how the clinic would be run.
FINALIZING DELIVERABLES
As the project drew to a close, I took in all the team’s most recent deliverables and found a clean and simple template to clean up the documents’ style.
I wanted these resources to be clearly related for the students. To be sure these resources could explain themselves, I turned the class timeline into a standalone document, and developed a resource map from the project tracker I had made earlier in the semester. both of these serve as documentation about how we intended for the resources to be used. These documents are colored to set them apart from the documentation meant to be seen by new members, and can guide those running onboarding using these resources through how we see our resources being used.
NEXT TIME…
I’ll be returning for another semester, so I’ll be able to sit in the front seat and observe how well the current onboarding resources work for the next cohort of the clinic. I think that these resources will naturally be something that one or two students revisit each semester, based on feedback and critique from the current students in the clinic. If at all possible, I think that the resources should largely be something handled and pioneered by newer members—on our team, while I could write on and on about little nuances and considerations my generation of the clinic put into everything, it was the new members who understood what was actually necessary to add to what onboarding they had just received.
INCORPORATE FEEDBACK & ITERATE
Following the critique day with all the teams, we met again to discuss and distill the critiques into a managable plan of action. This largely looked like moving pieces around into an order that made a bit more sense, after seeing which questions often arose from other teams’ first exposure to our mid-fi deliverables. Our biggest issue was the deliverables not being quite self-explanatory enough.
Pics from clinic media day here
DELEGATING DELIVERABLES:
Coming out of the interviews, we had a distilled list of deliverables and specific resources/topics which our new members had voted for us to prioritize.
Our team met to discuss mediums — videos, pdfs, step by step instructions, or linked external resources — of deliverables we could use to address various needs.
This came together my project tracking table, where we could overview the progress of each deliverable, and begin mapping the order or presentation of the result as it would be in the final class itinerary.
DEVELOPMENT SPRINTS & CONSIDERATIONS:
As we discussed the results of the interviews and began the first development sprint, we kept thinking about how each of the resources we were making would fit together into a smooth experience for someone brand new to the clinic: “if I were just joining, what would I need first—and what would make sense next?”. I helped track what each piece was for, how in-depth it needed to be, and where it belonged in the overall flow. Throughout the process, I worked closely with new members to gut-check assumptions and make sure the structure we were building actually reflected how someone new would move through it.
