Onboarding, New User Experience
A balancing act between regulations and reducing roadblocks
Overview
Onboarding is a crucial element in the customer experience and this early touchpoint can either increase your conversion rate or if done poorly, turn away potential customers.
New User Experience was newly formed team and given the goal to identify the roadblocks that prevented users from activating their account and create a frictionless and compliant onboarding experience.
Product Design Lead
New User Experience Team: Simran Awadia & Simon Bromberg, Technical Leads
Duration: April to May 2022 (3 months)
Responsibilities: Discovery, user research, user experience design, experiment generation, workshop development and facilitation.
Problem
Between October 2021 to March 2022, 83% of users dropped off during onboarding and as a result our customer acquisition cost was exceedingly high at $78 per acquisition.
One of the challenges was that we are an early stage investment product and we must comply with SEC regulations. Onboarding was a long 20+ step process that consists of three parts: know your customer (KYC), a risk assessment, and portfolio selection.
Being clear, building trust, and setting expectations
After analyzing the quantitative analytic data from onboarding, I identified 6 screens that caused the most significant drop-offs.
I had assumptions about why users dropped off, however I wanted to better understand the mindsets of users to inform our improvements. I conducted a qualitative research study that surveyed of 149 users and interviewed 11 users who dropped off during the onboarding process.
As a result of these interviews, I developed an emotional journey map using the patterns of feelings and sentiments I heard in the interviews.
Key Findings
Users would find us via digital ads, but the value proposition and features were unclear. Users were unclear about what they were signing up for or if it would actually be useful to them.
Trust needs to be built early through transparency and re-iterated throughout.
If you need to ask for PII, be clear about why you need it, how this information is used, and how it is protected.
Low value incentives are not enough to push users to complete high friction tasks.
Alignment and collaboration
This was the first time the individuals on this team worked with one another so I wanted to ensure we were aligned on our outcomes and that we were highly focused on being user-centric. Using the artifacts that I developed from the user research, I facilitated a 12-person internal workshop to align us and other stakeholders on the team’s goals. The workshop included:
Aligning on the emotional journey map: To ensure all team members and stakeholders understood the current emotional journey for our users today.
Empathy map brainstorm: To brainstorm the “future state” of how users should feel during onboarding.
Ideation brainstorm: To diverge on different ideas that would get us to how we want our users to feel.
Storyboarding: To explore and expand on new potential ideas for onboarding.
Setting the team’s direction
As a result of the alignment workshop, the team was able to work together in a common direction. Over the course of the quarter, our team developed our sprint process to ensure we worked as efficiently as possible.
The outcomes of the workshop:
Guiding principles for how the onboarding experience should feel like
A prioritized list of new opportunities to test with users
The start of an experiment roadmap for the New User Experience team
A series of experiments
Throughout the quarter, the New User Experience team executed a series of experiments that tackled the major drop-offs to improve the conversion rate. We ran 9 A/B tests over two months. Some of the effective improvements we made to onboarding included:
New informational modals that gave users more information about the data we requested, how it’s used, and why it’s required
More transparent information about privacy policies and security
Redesigning our questions and forms to increase efficiency in onboarding
Removal of questions that were not required by compliance
