Improve Onboarding Completions

Overview

Caden's onboarding flow is a bit more complex than the average app. Due to the nature of the Caden app, a lot more is being asked of the user in their initial session. The user must provide accept the terms and privacy, confirm they are of age, verify their email, and enable notifications (for data sharing).

This causes a lot of friction and many users abandon the flow midway. We conducted a research study to better understand why this is and how to improve it.

Problem

Their were two main drop off points. The first one was after download and before the user must input their email. This is when the user must accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We had a hunch those two pieces of legal text were causing users to abandon.

The second drop off point was before verifying their email. Most of the time users had to exit the app to retrieve a code from their email. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about this since users will naturally drop off when forced to leave the app.

Existing Flow

The existing flow was quite linear. The moments of friction are highlighted. This flow asked a lot more from users compared to other apps.

KPIs

Increase Completion

Decrease Session Time

User Testing

We conducted an unmoderated qualitative study with 12 new users that were an even distribution of gender, age, and locations. We asked questions about the following: App store impressions, account sign up process, and general first impressions.

We tested four versions of the flow below. The first was the current flow.

UX Updates

We found 3 explainers with the ability to skip was the right balance of information and autonomy. We also removed first and last name capture from this flow and moved it to another location on the app.

New Feature Updates

Explainers

After testing multiple explainer styles of different lengths and texts, we landed on including these. They were the right balance of information without causing overwhelm. It was also important to include "skip" funtionality for users who chose to bypass.

Legal

Although this went against Caden's "transparency-first" initiative, we decided to condense the Privacy Policy & Terms of Service. It was doing more harm than good and deterring valuable users. We also included brief summaries throughout the policy. In testing, users expressed appreciation for this and felt it made the app more trustworthy.

Progress Bar

Since this was a lengthy and unconvetntional onboarding, it was important for users to understand where they were in the journey and drive them to complete the entire process.

Post Launch Metrics

Decrease Drop-off

We were excited to see this increase two weeks post launch. The most impactful udpate was condensing the legal text.

Session Time

We did not see a huge change in time to complete the sign up process since we added and removed steps; however, more people were completing the process.

Learning

We made a lot of meaningful changes to the onboarding flow which resulted in an overall increase of users and data. We learned there is a delicate balance of information to share with users between actually informing them and overwhleming them.

Another interesting finding was that users were turned off when we talk about how much money they could earn up front. It came across as a scam. We used this insight to improve other channels of communications we have with the user like ads and app store imagery.