Optimizing an Onboarding Journey
Fixing a lose-lose-lose scenario to make sure users stick around.
This is the 2 min summary!
Skills demonstrated
User Research
Testing
Affinity Mapping
Journey Mapping
Experience Mapping
Stakeholder Management
Ideation
Brainstorming
Mockup
Prototyping
Intro
The problem: Potential new users were struggling during the onboarding phase.
I had to do something about the onboarding journey, as the customer success rate was not too satisfactory.
Planning
Based on the information I was given, the users we were attracting were:
- Generally creative
- Highly varied in technical proficiency
- Adults mostly in their 20's and 30's, but definitely can get older
- Initially arrived to explore the interesting medium
While we looked for potential test participants to test our current onboarding journey, I was also formulating a test methodology.
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I had prepared a plan to test the entire onboarding journey, including:
- Whether the user could start and finish the entire journey (i.e. find our site on Google, navigate our website, download the software, install, run it etc.)
- What they thought and felt at each phase of the process
- What they would rate various aspects of the journey
- What they would change And more
Within a few days, we had gathered 6 participants.
Testing & Findings
I scheduled and conducted tests with each participant. I made sure to record each test.
I had 6 documents with detailed information about how each participant fared throughout their onboarding journey. I scoured through these documents to find, and organize, an affinity map of all the trends and patterns.
At this point, it was time to make the actual journey map. The "columns" are in chronological order of the journey, and each row breaks down what the user may be doing, thinking and feeling at each step.
There were various issues throughout the journey, but none as prominent as what I called the "Valley Of Despair" (the prominently red area in the "Feeling" row).
When I was presenting the findings to my company, I called the red area the "lose-lose-lose" scenario.
- The users lost because they didn't know there was a free trial, with nothing required of them
- The company lost because the users were upset about steps they thought they had to take, but didn't
- Everyone lost because we could already give the users what they came here for, we just weren't communicating it!
There were some other issues regarding window placements etc. as well.
Solutions
As mentioned, most of the issues were not about what we were offering, but lack of clarity.
Most of these issues could simply be solved with well placed copy.
I was able to annotate every part of the site which was proving to be problematic:
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Using this plan, I then created mockups of the various pages which implemented solutions from findings.
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These changes were very quickly made by the webdev team.
Some website performance issues were handled by our developers as well.
Conclusions
We had made the necessary changes to improve the onboarding journey for our users.
Some of these changes were:
- Prominent "no credit card necessary" text
- Shorter overall journey
- Delaying account creation for user
- More efficient user survey for signup
We conducted another onboarding journey test a few months later, and the result spoke for themselves:
- 5/5 agreed that the journey was smooth
- 4/5 mentioned liking the information they got from the website
Overall the users flew through the journey and had no issues with discovering the site, browsing, downloading and running the app.
Lessons Learned
- Sometimes, the solution is simple, but knowing that the problem even exists requires good UX research
- Leveraging existing data can be powerful and efficient
- People like numbers and stats. There is no alternative for testing with impartial participants.