Wunder
App Onboarding
user interview for optimizing onboarding experience of the new version of Wunder
Project Type
Startup Project
Team
Feifei Deng, Wunder team
My role
UX Researcher
Duration
Jul 2020 - Aug 2020
overview
about the study
about Wunder
Wunder is a startup that focuses on developing a mobile app and physical device with a smart assistant to help parents track and manage their baby's cognitive development.
I met Wunder's product manager during the virtual Voice summit and joined the team as a part-time UX Design/Research intern. As the team was planning to launch the new version of the Wunder app and revise the onboarding process, my first task was to plan and conduct user research to guide and support the following onboarding experience revision.
why research
01.
The drop-off rate was relatively high during the onboarding process
02.
The new App would be an excellent opportunity to tackle the existing usability issues
Wunder team found the drop-off rate was relatively high during the onboarding process, and the onboarding process did not support first-time users' experience as expected. The team believed the new App would be an excellent opportunity to tackle the existing usability issues and provide a better user experience.
However, the new App could be a double-edged sword if the team failed to provide a fluent user experience, which would be harmful to the current product value. Thus, it was important for the team to understand what needs to be maintained and what needs improvement. Considering the time constraints, the team narrowed the scope of the research to onboarding improvement.
results
The overall research took around four weeks from research proposal to finding presentation, the findings synthesized from seven participants' interview results provided insights on 'Why users are subscribing,' 'Why users were quitting,' and 'How can we improve'.
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The findings and actionable design suggestions I provided helped Wunder determine the highlighted features of the app, revise onboarding process to reduce drop-off rate. The new App was launched on November, 2020.
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process
research procedure
before proposing research plan
As a new member of the team, I believed it is essential to get myself on board. I need to understand the past and current situation of the product, the support and resources that I could get from the team, and what expectations or struggles did the team have. Thus, before I started planning the research, I spent the first three days understanding the following questions by including different teams into the conversations:
01.
What was the problem space?
02.
Why did the problem space matter?
03.
What research had been done?
04.
What were the business goals?
05.
What were the onboarding goals?
I used this diagram to communicate my understanding of the user journey. In this diagram, I identified what elements are crucial to a sufficient onboarding experience with the team, which helped the Wunder team understand my considerations of the research.
preparations
research goals
The collected research data would be used as guidance for the design and revision of the onboarding experience. It would be part of the consideration of the future iteration of Wunder. After proposing my research plan and discussed with the teams, I established four main goals of the research:
01.
Reveal possible usability issues and confusions - what could go wrong?
03.
Identify the main contents that bring the most values to both new users and existing users
02.
Evaluate learnability and discoverability as well as the overall user experience
04.
Validate on-boarding goals
research questions
I investigated the following key questions with this study. These questions were developed based on my heuristic evaluation of the current Wunder app, new Wunder app prototype, and the user feedback from previous user research and survey. As Wunder team wanted to know both subscribed and canceled users' opinions, I decided to have two sets of research questions targeting these two groups of users.
For new users/subscribed users
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How is the overall experience of using the product?
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How easy can users understand each feature?
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How easy can users find the information they want?
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What information is most valuable to users?
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What issues do users encounter when using the product?
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When and why the frustrations occur?
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What improvements could be made on the existing design?
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What aspects/elements/features will affect/have affected the decision of subscription?
For users who no longer use Wunder
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What issues did users encounter?
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What was the most frustrating moment while using the app?
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What issues/frustrating moments made users decide not to continue the service?
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Do the users use alternative services/app?
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Why do users choose to switch to these apps?
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What improvements can attract users back?
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What something we could’ve done better?
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What factors make users consider a product as useful/valuable?
Questions for both groups
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How do users feel about migrating to a new app with different structures and layout?
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What information would the user want to find first
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What are the concerns about using a new app?
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When will the users feel comfortable or reasonable seeing the subscription plans?
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What information do users want/expect to see upfront?
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What is the most confusing part while using the app?
methodology
01.
Heuristic Evaluation
The first step was to let me be familiar with the current app and identified obvious usability deficiencies.
02.
Previous Surveys Analysis
The purpose was to build a basic understanding of the current user experience and determine what research questions should be included in the study to reveal the 'Why' behind the feedback.
I also used the data to further communicate with the teams and got the answers to questions such as how did the team handle the feedback, what was the initial considerations of the design decisions, and whether or not there were some technical issues that the study would not help to tackle, etc.
03.
Remote User Interview (Semi-Structured)
As my goal was to collect qualitative data from users, I chose user interview to receive thoughts and feedback on specific features. In the meantime, The semi-structured interview questions allowed users to have an open discussion with me and provide more details about their thoughts.
rationales behind the interview questions
When I decided interview questions, I wanted to use different questions to encourage users to think about how they used Wunder in their daily life, which allowed me to understand the answer within context.
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For example, the Wunder team agreed with my proposal for minimizing the onboarding process during previous discussions. I needed to figure out what features should be highlighted in the minimized onboarding process. Thus, I prepared three different interview questions to have a comprehensive understanding of what part was the most valuable and had high-frequency usage.
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In addition to asking users which feature they valued the most, I asked them to describe a typical example of how they used Wunder. This question helped me identify the most valuable feature by finding the repeated pattern from the answers and helped the team understand how the flows looked like when users tried to use Activity Recommendation.
the execution
recruitment
The project manager from Wunder team helped me with the recruitment process by sending out invitation emails that I drafted to both subscribed and canceled users from their user database. The email included the study's purpose, Calendly link for scheduling, the compensation we offered, and a consent form to ensure users feel comfortable participating the study.
semi-structured interview
I conducted remote interviews using Google Meet; an education specialist from Wunder team joined me during interviews as an observer and note-taker. These 30 mins interview sections were recorded, and I structured the research questions in Google form to collect data and notes. I recruited ten participants and ended up interviewing seven of them in total.
analysis and synthesis
I triangulated the data from heuristic evaluations, previous survey analyses, and interviews. Qualitative data were coded in Miro and categorized to match the two user groups I identified previously. I also analyzed the descriptive data generated by Google Forms.
01.
affinity diagram
I synthesized the interview data and identified what feature users use, opportunities, and issues. Then I categorized the data into three themes - Why are users subscribing, Why were users quitting, and How can we improve.
02.
content coding
I categorized the findings under each theme and used the 'What,' 'When,' and 'Why' format for the research presentation. The structure helped the Wunder team understand the users' feedback with content. The following diagram illustrated how I interpreted users' feedback using the 'What,' 'When,' and 'Why' format.
results
findings summary
findings breakdown
why are users subscribing
"Because I have no idea what I'm doing, I need some guidance of some kind."
why were users quitting
" I would only pay when I got more value than what I paid."
why were users quitting
" Some kind of 'how to'... 'click here' for activities walk-through..."
design suggestions
Taking time constraints, short-term launching goals, available resources, and my initial onboarding process proposal into considerations, I transferred the research findings and high-level suggestions into actionable design suggestions. I used mid-fidelity screens to demonstrate the potential design solutions to Wunder team during research results presentation, which became design references for the product designer to revise the onboarding flow.
limitations
Although I gathered some quantitative and qualitative data for product iteration, I informed the Wunder team of the study's inevitable limitations due to the participant profile and time constraints.
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limitations
01.
The results would have certain levels of biases as I didn't recruit enough users who were no longer using Wunder service.
02.
Didn't have enough data about why users were quitting and what were the issues
03.
The study didn't reflect how users would feel when they see the new app as I only shown the current screens during the study
solutions
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01.
Start the recruitment process earlier and reach out to new users or unsubscribed users to avoid receiving one-side opinions
02.
Collect reasons of cancellation through pop-up survey in the app
03.
Conduct usability testing or interview using screens from the new app to gather more accurate feedback and insights from the users