Peer Health Community
Increase user retention through a redesigned onboarding experience
Lean UX
Opportunity Mapping
User survey
User testing
A/B Testing
Iterative design
THE TEAM
Product Design Lead (me)
Product Manager
3 Full Stack Engineers
Design Research Manager
TIMELINE
6 months
THE CHALLENGE
Increase the number of new users returning in their second week of tenure while also helping modernize a 10-year old legacy product.
Explore the problem space
My team was asked to increase user retention of new users in their second week of tenure and create a new agile scrum team that would iterate on this problem.
We launched a two week discovery sprint to synthesize leadership’s vision, research what’s been done and explore opportunity areas. After presenting our findings, we decided to focus on one direction: the first time user experience after registration.
Existing experience
Build user understanding
To define what aspects of the product we needed to introduce new users to, we conducted a large scale member survey to understand current benefits, user value and expectations.
Over 350 new users responded to our survey, and we followed up with 6 participants through in-depth interviews.
We found three key needs users had when they joined: a social need to find others like them, an informational need to learn new health data and an exploratory one to get a sense of what our product was.
“[I want to] find other people like me in the same pain, and not feel so crazy because we can’t prove where the pain is from.”
— User survey response
Ideate
Leveraging the user research, product strategy and early discovery insights we gathered, I sketched out potential solutions, tying each to the strategy we had developed together.
To keep stakeholders and team members aligned, I made sure to visualize our product design strategy as it evolved. This took the form of standups, slide decks and whiteboards.
Test and learn
After conducting user research on a few potential designs, we launched the new onboarding experience as an A/B test against the current experience and the new process increased week 2 retention for new users by 31%.
In addition, users were 1.5x more likely to add a profile picture, and 2.3x more likely to add a brief bio.
My team would go on to concept, build and launch about 8 feature experiments every quarter.
Highlights include: User profile page redesign (2x increase in social interactions), navigation experiments (20% increase in retention), and null hypotheses were also important learnings (personalized welcome email, no significant change)
