June 2020
About
Our overall objective was to increase qualified app customers and capture data for future personalization and recommendation features, power our CRM team with more accurate info, and prompt customers to begin building out their favorites. We had an idea of some data we may want to collect but overall we wanted to allow users to populate a profile so that their app is in a state that can offer better recommendations and engagement while encouraging notification enablement and account creation.
User Research
We wanted to evaluate some onboarding concepts and pulse check what users would be interested in providing us. I asked 20 users to evaluate 8 different app features including location, travel radius, preferred categories, favorites, rewards, referrals, birthday gift and push notifications. For each feature, I evaluated familiarity, likeliness to use and willingness to enable push or create an account to use.
Our research found that users are open to an onboarding flow and would actively create an account in order to provide certain data points in order to personalize their experience or get special offers. The graph below summarizes what users chose as the feature they would be most excited about: favorites was a clear winner for high intent use as well push enablement and account creation.
Discovery
I laid out our business requirements versus user needs after making an empathy map. With clear goals defined, we defined our target users as existing app users, users downloading the app from a web purchase and new app download users.
We brainstormed with the larger team what information we would like to collect in this flow. With all the ideas collected, we decided to narrow the scope to collect first/last name, birthday, location, and favorites. All steps would be optional but you would have to create an account to start.
Ideation
There were two main things to think through:
a. what is the setup flow?
b. how do users getting into this flow?
I set up a matrix of how different users would get to the flow whether they were new download, existing, signed in, etc. I also started stubbing out what we would include on each screen, what the copy should be and playing with some visual designs.
Design
I designed a 3-step process that would collect personal information, location and then favorites. Adding a "skip" step was something our users said was important to them so I was sure to include. As mentioned before, all steps are optional but using disabled buttons encourages users to fill out information as they go through the flow. Our favorites screen presented users with the top 50 artists and all nearby sports teams as recommendations for them to 'favorite'.
For some of our flows, I designed welcome modals to either a. welcome users to the app and prompt account creation or b. prompt profile setup (and/or account creation) from existing app users. For existing users, they are prompted on their 2nd app launch after the feature release to (create an account and) set up their profile. For any account creation besides going through checkout, users are prompted to set up their profile immediately after account creation.
We decided to introduce a new gradient for these screens to refresh our look and identify this flow as cohesive yet independent.
Below you can see all the core flow designed as well as the various states of the three steps (loading, empty, filled out, error, etc) and all the flows to the setup for different users.
Release
After releasing this feature, we monitored engagement, steps skipped and various user events in order to evaluate if we need to make more changes in the future.
