Onboarding

Context

Rethinking the Onboarding Experience

Create a more meaningful, more compelling onboarding experience for users who newly install the CNBC app

Issues with Current Experience

• Design varies wildly between iOS and Android
• The only step for the user is enabling notifications
• A low double-digit percent of users are choosing to enable push notifications

New business requirements

The business requirements now require us to gate certain features - like building and maintaining watchlists - behind having an account

Due to this new requirement and thinking about the user's experience, it would be beneficial to have account creation and sign in pushed to the forefront as much as possible

Ideation

We held a workshop with cross-functional folks from across the organization

Included members from across the team and across disciplines to discuss goals, ideas, and the pros and cons of everything

How might we offer a compelling new onboarding experience?

A prevalent idea that was shared was to provide more ways for users to define and personalize their app experience from the start

We could offer key pieces of the app experience upfront to users to customize how they use and see content

As a group we sketched and voted for ideas

We determined the key components of onboarding we want to include

1. Account
• Account creation
• Sign in
• Syncing preferences and watchlists across platforms and devices
2. Watchlists
• Creating and saving watchlists
• Following symbols
• Consider adding pre-made watchlists from CNBC experts for users to follow
3. Notifications
• Toggle specific channels of notifications
• Toggling groups of notifications
• Consider providing more info into the content and timeliness of notifications

Utilize known data points

We know from analytics and user feedback that all of the above categories are under utilized

Streamlining the experience will be key

• Keep the amount of steps involved to a minimum
• Avoid overloading the user with too much all at once
• Allow users to skip steps to get into the main experience as quickly as possible

Concepts

Based on the results of the ideation workshop, I decided to create two conceptual variations

This would allow us to test order sequencing, visual aesthetics, interaction methods and will give us insight into general user sentiment

Concept 1

Concept 2

User Testing

We held five moderated interviews testing both concepts in alternating order

Feedback

1. Swipeable welcome pages preferred
• Users felt it gave them more control over what they were seeing as well as the overall video just feeling too long to get the point across.
2. Account creation preferred as first step
• Users felt it was more natural to create an account and that it lead better into watchlist creation
3. More customizable watchlist creation preferred
• Users felt the pre-populated symbols section by itself didn't meet their expectations and didn’t allow for enough personalization
4. More detailed notifications preferred
• Users felt there would be no good way to group all the different types of notification channels together in a way that made sense and felt like it actually would make more work for them if they wanted to only have a specific few channels enabled that aren't grouped together.
• Further feedback we received about this step in general was that it was hard to understand what kind of content would be surfaced with these notifications and that it was unclear about the frequency of the notifications sent, especially considering there appears to be many channels.
5. Concept 1's design and general flow Ppreferred

Design

App Screen Designs for iPhone

Overall Figma Design Documentation + Organization

Reflection

While we were never able to launch the new onboarding experience due to higher priority projects coming across the board in the form of the Investing Club, we learned many things which would go on to help inform future decision making.