Software giants, like Facebook, can be beat at their own game. Period.
In one of the latest products I designed, JoysTalk (a cool new instant messenger with games, which is designed especially for kids), we needed to create a winning on-boarding experience.
We followed the 3 steps of ‘Design Learning’:
1. Analyze the industry leader and basically copy their process – The logic behind it is ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’. If masses of users understand and use their process efficiently, why change that process for them? We’re professionals that can put our ego aside, and if a company cracked the process and is the best in its category, for our initial target audience (Israelis), their best-of-breed process will be more than enough for our needs, right?
Here’s the result:
2. Adopt to needed changes – we needed to add a unique image for winning and losing, for our platform, so we needed access to the camera for that, and so on. So, we made a few changes to create a smooth process for those users.
We adopted the language to our younger audience.
We also found out that many users drop when we ask for access to their Address Book so we postponed it, till the user already experienced the product and actually wanted to play a game with a friend (JoysTalk is a safe platform for kids, so no one can play a game without having that person in their address book first)
3. Redesign the whole process – once we understood the process, analyzed its pitfalls, and understood our target audience’s (kids) real needs (technical and emotional needs), we redesigned for them a whole new on-boarding process (based on our illustrated characters) for them, that originally looked like this:
As you can see, the whole original on-boarding process is still there, but is now wrapped in a story, loveable characters, and a challenge message to the user. High production value that includes vector illustrations (and will later on include animation).
After several iterations, the end-result looked like this:
We’re working hard on completing the integration of the new on-boarding experience these days, but initial numbers look like this:
The week number represents the cohort that joined on that week. On the X-axis you can see the progress the user does (from opening the app, till s/he plays 5 games – our current goal KPI), and within the cells you can see what % of users was lost at each step.
As you can see, at week 38, when we introduced the new on-boarding process, the % of ‘Users Lost’ was dropped to less than half (even without the animation we wanted to add), mainly (and this is my personal, unvalidated, belief) because:
The process is more emotional (conveyed through a ‘story/movie-like’ experience) and less technical
It creates more trust, as it explains why we needed certain user details
It offers a real promise to a concrete value (outstanding product experience) to our users…
* Of course the longer we wait, the better each cohort performs (as some of the users already opened the app but didn’t play yet, or played only once, will play again, and in order to reach the 5 games’ KPI, they just need a little more time…)
I hope you liked this case study, and got some insights and inspiration for your product.
If you did, do share it, so others could learn from our experience.
If you liked JoysTalk and would like to test it yourself with your kids, here are the links:
Remember, the biggest incumbents in our industry (like Facebook & WhatsApp in this case study), also started small sometime in the past, and they could be beat at their own game, if they ‘sleep’ too long on their existing products and success… Now, it’s our turn.
Does your application need an outstanding UX? We deliver! Contact us, at 2CENTS.co.il for outstanding UX. Guaranteed.