onboarding FLOW SImplification

Telecommunications Mobile App for ItsOn Platform

Project goal

Remove friction from sign-in to increase revenue, reduce user frustration, and decrease the number of customer care calls.

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. Therefore, ItsOn's carrier partners were losing potential revenue from purchases because users were required to sign in to make a purchase. Additionally, there were increased customer support costs, 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 solution (A preview)

Summary

Rather than fix something in the sign on flow, the solution was to change the mechanism for authentication. This meant that the only piece of information that the app would need to collect during onboarding would be the phone number of the user's device.

How this solved the problem (of users forgetting sign-in credentials)

Sign-in credentials would no longer exist unless the user went through an additional flow to set this 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.

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.

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