onboarding FLOW SImplification
Telecommunications Mobile App for ItsOn Platform
Project goal
Remove friction from sign-in in order to increase revenue, reduce user frustration, and decrease the number of customer care calls.
My role
Lead user experience designer. I worked closely with engineering and product managers to find a solution that was feasible in the short term.
Background
ItsOn is a platform that helps mobile carriers provide services to their end users. There are 3 major types of users to consider in every design change: operators who configure the end-user experience, end users, and customer support respresentatives.
I will show you my design process for the mobile app experience, but I also designed for the users of the web portal, Service Design Center, and Customer Support Portal.
the probleM
From a business perspective
Users were not able to sign in to their mobile apps because they were forgetting their sign-in credentials.
ItsOn's carrier partners were losing revenue because users were required to sign in to make purchases.
Customer support costs increased because users were calling customer support representatives to regain access to their accounts.
From a user perspective
This problem was initially discovered by the product manager on my team, when he met with customer care representatives to learn about the most common problems they were helping users fix. To dig deeper, members of my team in Mexico (where most of ItsOn's end users were located), conducted research to understand the problem at a deeper level by observing users using the app. They found that users were not able to remember their email addresses because many of the users did not have email addresses. Many users were just making up email addresses to get through the onboarding process.
After learning this key insight, it became clear what was wrong with the current flow:
The app was collecting unneeded information.
Not only was the app collecting a lot of personal information, it was making users enter it twice.
The app was presenting users with confusing decisions before they even had a chance to experience the app.
The process of joining another account was confusing. What is an OnCode?
The solution (A preview)
Summary
The solution was to change the mechanism for authentication so that the app would only need to collect the user’s phone number during onboarding.
This way, sign-in credentials would no longer exist unless the user went through an additional flow to set them up later, so there wasn't anything for the user to forget!
Researching best practices and common patterns
After understanding the research that was completed by ItsOn's team in Mexico, I researched best practices and common patterns.
I tested the onboarding flows of many mobile apps to understand what users are currently encountering. This was important so that I could make sure I didn't diverge too far away from the standards that users are used to.
I also read articles about the best practices for onboarding new users so that I could learn from previous attempts to solve similar problems.
Understanding the current system
It was important to understand the current system so that proposed changes would be feasible. This project was time-sensitive, so the redesign had to fit into the structure that already existed.
I tested the existing onboarding flow with many configurations of the app, put screenshots up on the wall, and found where the flows aligned with each other and where they didn't.
I created unified onboarding flows based off of the diagram to the left combined with feedback from engineering and product management. The example above is a deep dive into one piece of this flow.
the solution (in more detail)
summary
The solution was to remove the collection of any information other than a verified phone number during onboarding.
deliverable
The primary output of this redesign was the removal of screens in order to simplify the onboarding flow. An abstracted view of the onboarding was what was needed to make this change. More detailed interaction designs for each step of this flow would come in future improvements.
Above is the redesigned onboarding flow that was handed off to engineering.
next steps in the Short Term
This change affected experiences beyond the onboarding flow of the mobile app, so after redesigning the onboarding flow, I moved on to creating solutions for the following questions:
If the system uses phone numbers for authentication, how can users sign in to the web portal?
How can the system support people who have already set up an email address & password AND people who haven’t?
It is still important to ItsOn's carriers to collect email addresses for marketing purposes. How can the experience encourage users to provide this once they are in the app experience?
How does this change affect the customer service portal?
Next steps in the long term
Once this fundamental change to the system was complete, I dove into more details, including:
One-time password flow interactions
Permission requests
Waiting behavior while the system checked whether the user was eligible to sign up
Terms and conditions presentation
Analytics and surveys for users who didn't complete onboarding
One time password interactions
Permission request primers
Waiting behavior while the system is checking eligibility
Terms and Conditions presentation