Ripl | Onboarding Overhaul
My Role
UX/UI Direction
Product Direction
Product Strategy
Type of Work
UX/UI Design
Product Strategy
Design Research
A/B Testing
Background
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Ripl is a subscription service helping small businesses develop their social media presence. Ripl is your "marketing team in your product", and empowers customers to make their own social campaigns in just a few clicks.
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When I come on board to a new subscription product, I always want to know (1) how do existing customers feel about the product, (2) what do they value about the product, and (3) how effective are we in conveying that value to new customers? You can't demonstrate your value if you don't know your own worth.
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We conducted a series of scrappy studies to hone our message, and ruthlessly prioritized our first run experience to ensure we converted our new customers to instant fans.
Discovery | Data
Plain and simple, our first run experience was kind of a marathon. Customers sat through overview slides, were asked for information with no context for how it would be used, and then went through an upsell before they really knew what the product was all about.
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We dove into the metrics and found, not surprisingly, that our first run took much longer than customers expected, and identified several key steps where customers dropped before even getting to the home screen.
Discovery | 7/7/7 Framework
Enter 7/7/7
We needed an easy way for us to prioritize onboarding activities, and to ensure we balanced the need to introduce ourselves to new customers with their need to quickly decide, frankly, whether or not they wanted to keep our app on their phone. We created the 7/7/7 framework as an easy way to prioritize the user journey for their first seven days as a Ripl user, with the intention of highlighting only the most important and valuable steps and activities within the three specific timeframes. Do you need to a customer to link their Instagram ads account in the first run? No? Then move it to a later phase.
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Ripl was a paid service with a seven day free trial, so we created this framework to chart out the user journey from app download to paid conversion. The time frames represent natural benchmarks in the experience from first run to regular usage. Understanding the customer needs of the three phases through research, data analysis, and product testing provided us the proper knowledge to create a sticky and valuable experience for new RIPL customers.
7 min.
The first stage, seven minutes, focused on the first run experience and the early onboarding stages. We used this to eliminate any unnecessary steps while potentially introducing steps that correlated with trial take rates. Our goal was to create a seamless, engaging, and effective first run experience to quickly and easily highlight the value proposition (see PMF).
7 Hrs
Next we focused on the users' first and consecutive product visits after the first run. In this stage we optimized the remaining onboarding steps to create stickiness and buy-in. This stage also focused on introducing the user to additional features while giving room to explore and create.
7 DAYS
Our final stage centered on helping customers complete their profile while encouraging habitual usage and stickiness. During the first seven days we were looking to make Ripl an essential part of our customer's social media strategy by encouraging and empowering users to connect accounts, complete profile settings, and continuing to create & share content.
Discovery | PMF
During Discovery we also conducted a set of customer studies to measure Product Market Fit (PMF). PMF is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. As an established product in a highly competitive market, we wanted to learn both our degree of PMF as well as our opportunities to scale and compete effectively.
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Our PMF research asked the following:
➜ Does Ripl have product market fit?
➜ Is Ripl in a good place to scale?
➜ What are the most valuable benefits and features of the product?
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These studies concluded that Ripl customers valued our app (strong PMF), and we found a solid cluster of key features that customers "couldn't live without". ​​
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Design and Delivery
Tactical Changes
Using the 7/7/7 framework, we shortened first run to focus only activities critical to the first 7 minutes. This reduced onboarding time (app open to home screen) by 35% and the "time to first share" (home screen to first successful share) by 15%. We A/B tested all changes alone and in groups to determine the best combination.
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Key changes:
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Shortened "about" screens from 5 to 3 and added a "Skip" button
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Added Google login, and moved email account creation to a secondary option (adding an account with email took more than 2x the time, and created support issues with duplicate accounts)
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Moved business naming to the creator stage
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Moved system permissions to ask in-context (i.e. push notifications to after the share step)
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Strategic Changes
Our PMF study showed that customers valued our product, but only after experiencing the power and simplicity of our content and tools. We revamped our onboarding to ensure new customers used our key features before we introduced a paywall, and increased our customer activation by 23%. ​
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Key changes:
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We reworked our customer flow, funneling new customers into key features and directed them to create their first simple post.
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We moved the upsell to after their first creation but before they could post. This decreased the number of upsells shown but increased the overall number of "7-day trialists" and conversions.
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We focused our product team on improving these key areas to ensure we delighted our customers where it mattered most.