KOYA: Reimagining the Onboarding Experience
Project Overview
Over 28 million people are currently in long-distance relationships within the United States. One of the most important things that keep a relationship alive is constant communication and expressions of love. Fortunately, with KOYA, an app that specializes in unique messaging and gift-giving using geolocation, people in long-distance relationships can share unique methods of personalized communication.
Scope of Work
My team and I were confronted by the founders of KOYA with the need to improve their onboarding process because they noticed that users were falling off early on. Also, they wanted to refresh the home page by giving it a clear call to action. KOYA is a virtual gift-giving app that uses geolocation as a way to make memorable and personalized experiences at a specific time and place. With this in mind and the need to improve their current onboarding experience, we used human-centered design grounded in empathy and research to approach research and design.
Product Principles
Before diving into research we agreed to constantly refer back to KOYA’s mission statement, product principles, and branding guide to stay aligned with the heart, essence, and tone of who KOYA is. Also, we noted assumptions to focus on where potential problems could arise throughout the research phase.
Research & Discovery Phase
The clear goal of our research was to understand why users were not making their way through onboarding. In order to do this, we needed to discover where points of friction and resistance users expressed moving during the onboarding process. Also, it was important for us to understand who users are and what their preferred onboarding experience would be.
As we dove into our research we conducted five user interviews with people between the ages 16 and 35 over zoom. This allowed us to focus on how people felt about onboarding and privacy. We crafted each question with thoughtful consideration to encourage interviewees to share as much as possible.
After our interviews, we began to synthesize the interviewees’ feedback, comments, and behaviors through affinity mapping. Affinity mapping is a research method that highlights the trends within the data by using post-it’s. From there we generated major insights from our research which we then used for creating our persona.
A persona is the entirety of the people we interviewed. Our persona’s name is Ava and she serves as a single representation of the key trends we found during the interview process. We used Ava as a reference throughout the rest of the research and design phase.
Once the persona was created we ran usability tests on the existing app to learn how it was currently performing with its users. We tested how users completed the onboarding process. From the testing results, we learned that users gave the ease to complete a task at a three out of five. The success rate was 20% which showed that users were having a difficult time completing the task. The average time on task was seven minutes and sixteen seconds.
We created user flows to visualize the decision points and the number of screens a user would interact with throughout the process of onboarding. This allows us to identify any additional barriers we could run into along the way.
We conducted a journey map to visualize the process that our persona goes on in order to accomplish a key task in KOYA. Doing this helps us to identify the emotional journey of users. It showcases the pain points and highlights while also presenting opportunities, and the touchpoints used while a user would complete this task.
Before moving into the design face we took the insights from our user interviews and journey maps and concluded that users were having a hard time onboarding because the process was cumbersome and lacked appropriate context.
Ideation & Design Phase
As we moved into the design phase we started with doing a Design Studio. This ideation method used timed sessions to explore a wide range of design solutions by doing quick sketches. We focused on visualizing the initial onboarding process and the homepage. We produced multiple low-fidelity sketches which helped us move into the second phase of design.
As we entered into producing the mid-fidelity wireframes we were able to pull from the ideas generated from the Design Studio. We used Figma to prototype the interactivity between screens and began doing multiple rounds of testing with each iteration. The insights we came away with were:
- Users commented on appreciating the simplicity within the functionality
- Some users still felt the process was too long which could cause them to fall off. How to combine tasks and screens to shorten the onboarding process
- Users still want it not to be mandatory for them not to share contacts and other private information
- Carousel needs to be simplified, too wordy
- We need to communicate better that this is a meaningful app and a smart gifter
- We need to be intentional about the call to actions, make the skip smaller
- We must help the user to personally connect with why they would want to share a message while also allowing them to skip
After gathering and synthesizing the insights from the mid-fidelity testing we added the necessary changes to begin the designs for the high-fidelity prototype. While conducting these tests it was important that we asked specific questions around, overall understanding of what the app does, feelings about sharing privacy, and the general ease of completing the onboarding process. As we gathered our results we were glad to see drastic improvements. We measured our improvements in 3 ways. Starting with the success rate, we saw a 30% increase in this statistic which shows users were better able to grasp the onboarding process. The easiness rating increased by one star. This shows how implementing the changes helped lessen friction during the onboarding process. Lastly, the time on task decreased and which shows that users are taking less time to read through the app.
As we move forward into the final stages of the design and development phase we have identified three main areas of focus for our next steps. We would want to focus on research by conducting another round of testing on the final hi-fi prototype after including the changes from the high-fidelity design. Also, locate additional areas of friction the user is experiencing. We would want to continue to hash out and test the messaging and its effectiveness with users. As we head into the development phase we would consider including Spotify, Youtube, and Apple Music APIs for users to share links to their music more swiftly.
Based on our research, insights, and design changes we believe the onboarding process will be improved drastically. KOYA’s ability to present meaningful moments across time and space personalizes gift-giving to an extent like no other. The result of improving the onboarding experience allows for more people to encounter the beauty of discovering additional moments of love in the most unique way.
Please find the prototype view the new feature here:
https://www.figma.com/proto/wtOIYEP6ce592LLkS5zTwO/P5-User-Flow?node-id=278%3A11681&scaling=min-zoom&hotspot-hints=0
