Redesigning The Mighty Onboarding Flow
ROLE & DURATION
UX/UI, Prototyping & Testing
Team of 2 designers, 2 product managers, and 2 developers
May – Aug 2019
The Beginning: iOS to Android
On September 16th, 2018, The Mighty launched its first ever iOS app to overwhelmingly positive user feedback. The app is a safe place where people facing health challenges can get and give support through finding community and making connections. Time spent on the app was almost 10X the time spent on the web. Engagement spiked dramatically. But for us to maximize our growth goals, we needed to address a large segment of our audience – Android users. With almost half of the Mighty users owning Androids, the clear answer was to create a new Android app, making it better than the existing iOS app by leveraging user data.
Taking a Step Back
Existing iOS onboarding flow overview:
Facebook/Email Sign Up at Profile Creation — Retrieving basic information from users
Topic Search and Follow – Allow users to search topics to follow
User Research: Uncovering the Challenges
Before I jumped into the redesign, I wanted to understand the pain points and opportunity areas of the existing user flow through synthesizing user research. After the iOS app launched, our team conducted churn user interviews to better understand how we can improve both the existing app and the future one. Some of the questions we asked:
• What attracted you to the app?
• What did you expect when you entered the app?
• Why did you abandon the use of the app?
Churn User Interviews Conducted by The Head of Experience
The data gathered from the interviews shined a light on three major issues that existed within the current flow:
Problem #1: Lack of Guided Onboarding Process
Users desired a more engaging onboarding experience that clearly communicated the benefits of joining the community.
Problem #2: Missed Opportunity for Information Gathering
Because we didn’t utilize data collection at on-boarding, we were missing a big opportunity to gain user insights that will inform what content to offer them and what content to create in the future.
Problem #3: Lacking Sense of Community
The lack of empathy and warmth within the existing onboarding flow didn’t reflect the welcoming community we were promised.
Early Ideation: Iterate. Test. Repeat.
After discovery, it was time to process the feedback we gathered. I worked with product managers and Head of Experience to prioritize which data we wanted to collect from the user and simplified the onboarding flows into bite-sized screens that would lighten the cognitive load on users and enable easier experimentation.
The New Onboarding User Flow
The New Onboarding Initial Wireframes
After testing early wireframes with stakeholders, we were confident with our direction and decided to move forward. For the new and improved onboarding flow, it incorporated:
• Visually consistent layouts
• Welcoming verbiage
• Community recommendations to users based on health background
Problem Solved: Design Solutions
More Ways to Join
Since most Android users have Google accounts, adding the “Continue with Google” button to the existing email and Facebook sign up options was an obvious solution. I’ve also considered adding a “Continue with Apple” option for our upcoming iOS Flutter app as Apple just announced its new feature to verify users’ credentials.
Less Barriers to Entry
In the world of mobile apps adoption, the more fields you expect users to complete, the more likely they will abandon the process altogether. Given this insight, the only information required to sign up for a Mighty profile will be username and birthday (users must be 13 and older to sign up)
While users can choose to provide full names, we didn’t force their hand. To reduce the effort of creating an account even more, I removed the profile photo upload feature and replaced it with an assigned default avatar.
Getting to the Good Stuff Faster
As The Mighty’s value proposition is “Get Support and Give Support”, we didn’t waste our user’s time with a tutorial right away. Instead by simply asking them about what brought them to the app and set proper expectations on what we offer.
Find Your Health Tribe
Once users join the support ecosystem, they desire even more personalized connections. Today, the Mighty users fall into three persona categories:
• People with health conditions and ongoing changes in condition
• Caregivers to someone with a health condition and wishes to support them
• Health professionals who desire deeper insight into their patients
By designing screens that prompted users to input information about their health conditions and needs, we were able to match them with the communities who can offer the support they desire.
Making it Inviting
As a platform that promotes community and connection, I had to lead by example – this starts right at onboarding and beyond. To make the process feel warmer and more welcoming, I added several transition screens incorporating emojis, fun copy, and overall social media-friendy undertones. I’ve also added more context to the community card, like people stack and descriptions.
Seeing the Impact: Measuring the Success
Numerous hours of brainstorming, concepting, designing, and development produced a result that was a more positive, instructive, and effective on-boarding experience, empowering users to feel more connected and informed at every step.
Project Takeaway: Persuade With Prototypes
When I presented the new onboarding flow to stakeholders, they were concerned that the flow may be too lengthy, and may cause users to drop-off. However, the flow covered all possible user scenarios and wasn’t limited to a single flow a user will encounter. So, I quickly created an inVision prototype for a single user, making a compelling case that the flow wasn’t as lengthy as it seemed on the design spec. This simple switch of presentation style led to the buy-in I needed and approval for launch.