Goldstar Onboarding
Getting users started on the right foot with a great onboarding experience is critical at Goldstar, and sets the tone of much of the user's future experience and potential value.
Roles Led a design workshop, created wireframes and prototypes.
Outcomes Increased favoriting +325%, email engagement +12%, purchase conversions +4%.
Process
We had already implemented an onboarding process, but wanted to align it with business priorities. To do this, we took the time for more extensive discovery work to help ground our ideas.
We ran a design sprint to solicit input across the business and generate a wide range of concepts.
The business was steadily shifting away from the community features (commenting, profiles) it had started with, and toward more scalable engagement features, like personalization and recommendation engines. Onboarding was a key step in priming these features, so as feature priority changed, we knew onboarding had to as well.
We ran a design sprint with key stakeholders from around the company. Our goal was to invite a diverse a set of perspectives who we felt would be good contributors to the exercises. We sketched many wildly different concepts, which helped generate a lot of good ideas on approaches and concerns.
Taking these ideas, the design team worked on finding simple, maintainable, and sustainable ideas that we could implement that would drive favoriting in ways we could leverage in our recommendation engine, which powers the personalized emails we send.
Iterating on Designs
The designs started out very conceptual, but as we iterated on them, we pared them down so they were really focused on only doing one job as well as they could.
We iterated and evolved the onboarding designs several times.
Surprises
We uncovered a couple of opportunities to improve the overall experience in the course of this project.
First, we were able to simplify the signup process by moving the "choose your city" setting into onboarding. This step is usually primed automatically, using geolocation, but we had a requirement to allow the user to confirm their choice because we have a large number of users in large cities who often go out in an area different than where they use the app (eg, work).
We also noticed that we had a large number of existing users who hadn't ever been through onboarding. We wanted to give them the chance to personalize their experience as well, so I collaborated on a fix with engineering.
Outcomes
As a result of the onboarding improvements, we increased favoriting 325%, email engagement by 12%, and purchase conversion by 4%.
The huge increase in favoriting was largely expected, given what we knew about user behavior, but we also felt it was a bad idea to be so dependent on onboarding to drive personalization. This project spurred additional work to discover more ways in which we could engage users to personalize their experience.