Playfull is a mobile app that allows users to play games and win discounts and free food at restaurants. While the app's retention rate for returning players was strong, it was much lower for first-time users. Upon closer analysis of user data, I noticed that there were steep drop-offs in key steps of the product funnel for new users.
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The data strongly pointed to the importance of improving our current first-time user experience, which currently consisted of a few slideshow screens at registration. To solve this problem, I proposed a redesign of the first-time user experience that would better incentivize and guide users through the core features of the app.

The app’s user base consisted entirely of college students. As a college student myself, I knew for a fact that all of my friends would do almost anything for free food. Improving user retention would undoubtedly be positive for our business goals as well. So with the stakeholders on board, this led us to the question: how might we quickly and clearly deliver value to new users?

In order to understand current user behavior, I dug into current product data. I had two questions that I wanted answers to before redesigning the onboarding experience:

The core funnel consisted of three main steps: registering, playing a game, and finally, getting a food reward. I compared the funnel completion rates of new users given 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days. I was surprised to see that virtually nothing changed in the funnels for Day 7 and Day 30, and even from Day 2 to Day 7. In fact, on Day 1, most new users will either stop at any one of the core steps and never return, or finish the funnel and become a returning user.

I defined returning users as those who had completed an action in the app at least one more time within 30 days. By and large, returning users had completed all three steps of the core funnel at least once. This was strong evidence that returning users understood the value proposition and how to use the app. Similarly, our onboarding experience needed to help new users understand a product that (ironically) at first glance may seem too good to be true.
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In order to assess the effectiveness of the current onboarding experience, I explored the data and identified several points in the core funnel that new users tended to churn at. These rates were much higher compared to returning users, and included the following actions:

On the other hand, steps that new users were completing at a high rate included:

Comparing other products’ onboarding experiences, such as those of Duolingo, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Quora revealed several commonalities between all of them:

The most effective onboarding experiences are able to show new users the value of the product as quickly as possible which typically leads to high retention rates. The experience also should teach users how to accomplish key actions, instead of leaving users to learn on their own.

We knew that the strongest value proposition for Playfull was the offer of free food and food discounts. As alluring as that sounds, however, new users will not open the app again if they do not know learn to perform the actions necessary to attain value. Our solution would need to focus especially on guiding users and highlighting key actions.

The stakeholders and I decided to prioritize the retention of new users. Based off current trends in the app and insights from research, the new first-time user experience would guide users through the core funnel with visual cues and clear instructions. To encourage exploration within the app, we would reward users for completing each step. Our goal was to use the onboarding experience to integrate new users by helping them attain value — free food and food discounts — in their very first interactions with the product.

I encountered several challenges while creating user flows, namely how to guide users while allowing them opportunities to explore the app, and how to segment steps in the core funnel and make them engaging for new users.

I made multiple iterations after reviewing with the lead product designer and stakeholders as we discussed what kind of rewards we wanted to give and the frequency. I chose to create a progression bar on the home screen that would give new users simple directions, as well as hint at the possibility of rewards at each step to incentivize them to complete tasks. I included Pluu, the character who represents the voice and branding, throughout the experience to start building a relationship with the new user. I also used a slight jumping animation to draw the attention of new users to tabs that we wanted them to navigate to.

We used a simple click-through prototype to conduct usability testing with 5 participants. The goal was to find areas of confusion and patterns of behavior. I also wanted to see participants’ emotions and reactions from progressing and receiving rewards and whether participants understood the value of the app. I gave participants a scenario to help them get into the mindset of a new user and 3 tasks.

As I expected, participants gave a lot of great insight with their observations, reactions, and behavior. All 5 participants were able to verbalize what the value of the app was and how they could get more discounts and free food. However, the testing revealed the unclarity of the button under the progression bar. When asked about their opinion on the prompters, all participants reacted positively, and said that even more cues for what to do next would be helpful.

As Playfull is a fast-paced startup, the stakeholders and I made changes to the feature two months after the first feature release because we saw an opportunity to also meet another product goal: player growth. From the data collected during the feature’s release as well as user feedback, we saw that while new users were converting in-store redemptions at a higher rate, pick-up orders did not see a comparable increase. I hypothesized that the current language within the app and in the onboarding experience was causing confusion between the two different kinds of rewards for some new users. As a result, I wanted to gauge users’ reception to the existing content that new users would first see.
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I found 5 participants; their experience with Playfull ranged from no prior experience to daily user. I structured my content testing by simply printing out all the plain-text copy onto a sheet a paper for participants to read. I gave them two pens of different color, and asked them to mark words or phrases that they liked or made them feel more confident in using Playfull with one color, and to mark words or phrases that they didn’t like with another color.

As I expected, participants gave a lot of great insight with their observations, reactions, and behavior. All 5 participants were able to verbalize what the value of the app was and how they could get more discounts and free food. However, the testing revealed the unclarity of the button under the progression bar. Moreover, when asked about their opinion on the prompters, all participants reacted positively, and said that even more cues for what to do next would be helpful.

Some major takeaways from this testing:

Based off user feedback from the usability testing, I made several key changes. I had learned that the buttons were visually not actionable enough, so I changed the color of the UI element for greater contrast and readability. Furthermore, I added prompters to guide users through the onboarding experience and therefore the core features of the app. Before testing, I had used a jumping animation because I wanted the prompters to be more subtle, but they ended up being hard to notice. Moreover, nearly all of the participants had said that they preferred to be guided by the pointers. I learned that visual cues were much more likely to be noticed than copy, and that in general, users will follow pointers.
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The later iteration of the feature featured changes in the user flow. Instead of guiding users to the order ahead flow, we opted to guide them to the referral flow because it objectively delivered more immediate value to users. Furthermore, I incorporated feedback from the content testing and altered content that users did not react favorably to by replacing them with words or phrases that they did react positively to, or I substituted them completely.
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After two iterations of this feature, we designed this onboarding experience to delivery tangible value early to users and to eliminate confusion. The desired results from this would be increasing user retention and product growth.

We successfully shipped the feature for the first time in September. Over the course of the next 6 weeks, we saw improvements in funnel completion rates in all areas, with over a 10% improvement at the end of the funnel -- redeeming a reward at our partner restaurants.

However, as business goals changed to focus on player growth, we iterated on this feature to channel new users to the referral feature. This has helped bolster player growth and has brought more customers to restaurants on our platform.

Working on this feature was a tremendous learning experience. I was able to lead an entire feature cycle, beginning with communicating with stakeholders, then proposing solutions to address business and user needs, making data-driven decisions, and iterating on designs.

Looking back on the design process, I would have liked to spend more time researching who our first-time users typically are. I had operated under the assumption that new users were the same as the our core user base -- students in college -- which may not be the case. If not, this would lead to questions about why this user group was interested in the product, if there were opportunities to be explored, etc. In the future, I think it will be important to not only validate design concepts, but also to understand who we are validating them for.
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Overall, I really enjoyed working with my team to create this feature, and am truly thankful for this opportunity and all that I have learned!