Onboarding – “lite”

***

Overview

Customers who receive strong onboarding stay engaged, see value faster and become long-term advocates. However, these same customers are irritated by lengthy onboarding procedures.

Objective

While we initially created a much more comprehensive onboarding process, there were concerns about the effort needed to build it. In order to more quickly test out the hypothesis, we decided to create a lighter version, concentrating on three actions that we knew—from a data standpoint—had the highest impact on customer retention by far: 1. sharing the subscription, 2. signing up for newsletters and 3. downloading the app.
 
So with that in mind, we concentrated on sharing the subscription, signing up for newsletters and downloading the app. Podcasts, topics, authors, and other advanced personalization elements were moved to the next phase—since they were likely to be the most development-heavy. The thinking was that we could prove that onboarding had value while we worked on those other parts.

My Role

I created wireframes, high-fidelity designs, interactive prototypes, and detailed specifications to support development and implementation.

Outcome

Initial testing indicated that customers understood the concept of the light onboarding and appreciated that it was quick enough that it didn’t impact their goal of accessing the content immediately. Nearly half of the test audience also expressed that they wanted clear indications that they could do a more comprehensive onboarding later, and expected to be reminded and directed on how to do so.
 
The onboarding lite process has been built, but hasn’t yet been rolled out, due to other more pressing concerns.