UX Case study -- Onboarding for Policyholder Engagement app

Overview

Sureify is developing a white label mobile app that fosters and maintains the life insurance carrier-consumer relationship. It provides various habit-forming and educational features for users to help maintain their physical, mental and financial wellness. Based on previous user interviews, the existing onboarding flow didn't leave a deep impression on users, and wasn’t successful at communicating the purpose of the app. Onboarding is the first opportunity for user engagement, our goal is to redesign it and make it more effective.

My Role

Lead product designer
_{(Worked through the entire design process and artifacts of this project.)}

Team

Product designer (Siân Parry)
Product manager (PM)
Development (Dev)
Client (life insurance carrier)

Duration

23 story points (180+ hours)
Launched Sept 2023

Impact

Design Process

Scope & Strategy

Understanding users

In the beginning, it is important to identify the target user group and associated use cases when defining the scope of the flow. When redesigning the onboarding flow, our primary focus was on policyholders who just downloaded the app for the first time.

After going through the old flow and understanding the business needs with our PM, we defined following goals that the new onboarding flow has to facilitate. This became the guiding principle of design and measurement of success:

Defining requirements

We started by doing secondary research and benchmarking to learn about onboarding best practices, what content to include and what ideas to apply. Based on research findings and goals defined above, I created a list of requirements the onboarding flow must have to guide our design, refined it with other designers, then shared it with PM for feedback:

Next, we determined how to integrate all the elements above into a user flow, established their sequence, and defined the specific screens that needed to be created.

2. Ideation & Design

Lo-fi wireframing

We shared the user journey with PM and got some feedback, based on that and further considerations, we made some changes to the flow, then we came up with lo-fi wireframes to visualize it.

Considerations:
• Keep the focus on what the app provides + values/benefits, instead of explaining how to use features (we have too many features to expose equally in a short amount of time, so we’ll leave that to intuitive UX within each feature).
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• We want users to finish the explicit onboarding journey within 1 minute to avoid drop-off.

Changes made to the flow:
• Moved “Intro tasks” from explicit onboarding to the Dashboard to shorten the flow and enhance the focus.
• Moved the celebration screen to the end of the explicit onboarding as a better transition to the Dashboard.
• Minimized the number of screens and keep the flow concise.
• Reduce the complexity of the implicit onboarding part, keep all tasks within one section on Dashboard.

Hi-Fi Designs for user testing

3. Multiple Iterations

User testing

We decided to conduct user testing for following objectives:
• Validate our onboarding solution from user's perspective - effectively communicating the app's purpose and guiding users on the right path to start exploring and utilizing its features.
• Observe user preferences on certain design decisions we made.
• Pinpoint any usability issues users encountered to determine areas for improvement.
• Identify positives of the UI / UX.

I first made the testing plan, including a interviewer script; then we recruited 11 target users and did 1:1 remote testing sessions with them. I synthesized research findings for each section of the onboarding flow, along with recommendations for design changes.

Overall, users generally understood what the app offers. The majority of users thought that the flow was intuitive and easy to use, in line with onboarding expectations based off other apps. We also spotted some usability issues, and were able to fix them by improving our design:

Iteration highlights

1. Sign up entry point in Purpose screens

Testing findings:
• Some users thought the onboarding process was too long

• Observation suggests that most users didn’t carefully read the purpose screens.

Before

After

Changes:
Refined the wording of the titles of each screen so users can get a clear idea just by skimming.
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Users can swipe through images and sign up from any screen, hence reduce the time for them going through the flow.

2. Terms and conditions mechanism

Testing findings:
The Terms & Conditions screen brought up by pressing the check box is an unexpected behavior to users.

Before

After

Changes:
Since it is required for users to read Terms & Conditions, we just asked users to read it as a normal step of the flow. Users can choose to agree or cancel the flow.

3. Increase transparency of notification settings

Testing findings:
Majority of users didn’t want to turn on notifications during onboarding, but some would sign-up later if there were good reasons to

Before

After

Changes:
Provided good reasons and flexibility to encourage users to enable notifications.

Further notification triggers will be included in features once users enter the app, in case it was skipped here.

Adjustments based on Dev team & client

With the updated HiFi design, we
• White-labeled it with the client’s branding and presented it for approval, with tweaks on content and based on client’s requests.
• Shared it with the Dev team for tech feasibility check, then made further subtle iterations during sprint grooming calls and Dev feedback sessions throughout development.
• Finally, duplicated and modified the flow for the other user group -- public users’ journey.

Final onboarding flow

For confidential purposes, the design is showcased in Sureify’s branding.

Section 1. Introducing the purpose of the app

Section 2. User sign-up

Despite exploring Google/Apple SSO, we decided not to apply it for now and continued having users sign up with their emails. This method didn’t allow us to collect users' emails as the client required, and it also didn’t significantly shorten the flow as anticipated.

Section 3. Personalization & notification/device set up

• Users can enter their interests to personalize the content of the app; the carrier can collect useful data from users.
• Added a Back button to specific screens to enhance the flow's flexibility and encourage user data input.
• Emphasized incentives at the end of the flow by informing users of the points they earn from setting up the app, thereby encouraging user data input.

Section 4. Implicit onboarding

If users didn’t set up notifications or device during explicit onboarding, it will become a task and show up here. We also offer tasks with incentives to encourage users to explore features. Users can start from any tasks they want.

Impact

To measure the success of our project, we took a close look at a few key indicators:
• We maintained a onboarding completion rate of 88% within three months after the launch.
• The engagement rate increased by 12% one month after the new onboarding was launched.
• We maintained a retention rate of 23% three months after the launch.
• There has been a 0% user support request rate from the launch until now.

These numbers highlight the positive impact of our redesigned onboarding flow on user engagement and satisfaction. As a next step, we plan to send out an in-app survey to gather qualitative feedback about our users' onboarding experience.