RechargeSMS Onboarding
Project
Redesign the RechargeSMS Onboarding Experience
Overview
Recharge processes recurring payments for over 15,000 merchants, powering their subscription programs.
When their customers purchase a subscription, they can opt into seamless notifications via RechargeSMS, a text message subscription management tool that sends 6M messages a month. This transactional messaging tool not only empowers customers, it improves their LTV (lifetime value).
An overarching goal for 2022 was to increase the number of merchants sending SMS by 10%. As we followed our users through their journey--from installation to onboarding until activation--we noticed that engagement declined significantly during onboarding and activation.
I explored opportunities to improve the onboarding experience to unleash the product's adoption potential and increase customer lifetime value.
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Exploring user needs
Merchant feedback was invaluable at this step in discovery. I synthesized feedback from meeting with merchants, and corroborated my findings with data analytics and insights from the RechargeSMS product support and product marketing. Here were the key takeaways:
- 🫣 Users are nervous that they'll make a mistake while setting up
- 🌗 Many start but don't explore most pages
- 🎙️For some, branding and tone of voice is really important, so they delay enabling the service to modify message templates
Holistically evaluating the entire user journey was eye opening. I documented the current state of the onboarding experience in a comprehensive user journey map, which led to a few insights around the UX and opportunities to explore for the UI:
- ℹ️ Encouraging feedback and error management was lacking
- 📍 Location of tool tips added a layer of complexity when updating UI
- 🪜 Steps and length of onboarding were lengthy
Making informed decisions
Together with product design, we explored an extensive MVP solution to these user needs that I then articulated by themes:
- Feedback: Introduce encouraging CTAs, progress bars, feedback states to report successful completion, etc.
- Essentials: Shorter onboarding, hyper focused on necessary steps for activation with other pages as future recommendations
- Rearrange: Strategically use a moment that demonstrates the value proposition as motivation to complete onboarding.
- Onboarding buddy: A new, scalable UI for the app status indicator and activation state.
Feature prioritization
- Feedback: Introduce encouraging CTAs, progress bars, feedback states to report successful completion, etc.
- Essentials: Shorter onboarding, hyper focused on necessary steps for activation with other pages as future recommendations
- Rearrange: Strategically use a moment that demonstrates the value proposition as motivation to complete onboarding.
- Onboarding buddy: A new, scalable UI for the app status indicator and activation state.
Product process
Because onboarding is so critical, this refactor was a big cross-functional effort from start to finish involving multiple teams. In short, my contributions to drive the end to end product development process included:
- Synthesizing insights and formulating a direction into a product requirement doc
- Discussing feature functionality, feasibility, and extensibility with design and engineering
- Partnering with product design to explore and iterate elegant design solutions
- Writing the user stories and acceptance criterion for the tickets and prioritizing them
- Socializing the project with product marketing, product support, and data analytics
- Discussing plans for improved internal analytics
- Testing with QA for Acceptance
Rocket launched
The end product was a streamlined, focused onboarding experience to better educate and motivate users to progress through onboarding.
We introduced an "onboarding buddy" UI at the bottom left-hand corner to ground and guide the users, which also housed the various types of feedback we added to enhance the experience.
Following the launch of our new onboarding, we saw completion rates rise as high as 66% and we exceeded our goal of increasing adopted users! 🎉
Next steps
Data Analytics
The former version of Onboarding didn't have a robust tracking system, so I worked with the Product Data Analytics team to implement dashboards to capture new metrics. I'd slice and dice the data to make informed decisions for future iterations and improvements.
Qualitative Feedback
By chatting with merchants shortly after onboarding and observing new users proceed through the redesigned onboarding, I started to gather invaluable insights, and had plans to discuss future recommendations with the product designer.
