Problem

The company was overhauling the existing consumer mobile banking app. There will be a drastic difference between the current version of the app and the forthcoming version of the app. The company anticipates user confusion and unhappiness.

Solution

Conduct secondary research through competitive comparisons and industry analysis of mobile app onboarding experiences to determine psychological considerations, best practices, and common patterns. This will inform design to make the transition as smooth as possible for users.

DISCOVER

With a general understanding of the problem, I began the discovery phase. My general approach is to gather as much information as I can from as many diverse sources as possible, and then filter by quality. For this project, I read articles from design research groups, thinkpieces from well-regarded designers, looked at non-digital onboarding approaches, collected UI concepts from designers on Dribbble and Behance, as well as UIs found both in and out of the financial industry, sections of a few experience design books I own, etc.

I documented everything I found in Sketch and classified it into two groups: experience or interface. The experience group contained everything related to users’ psychological motivations, cognitive patterns, flow best practices, and what value onboarding provides. The interface group contained everything visual such as common UI patterns, elements I thought would be interesting to draw from, and representations of users’ expectations of similar UI.

DEFINE

From there, I sifted through and started to pull out common themes and consensus I found. This helped me to distill the overwhelming amount of information into something much more manageable for myself, but also for when I had to share it out to others. The experience group of information was molded into a narrative similar to a Powerpoint presentation: introducing and defining the subject, setting context on where it applies, breaking it down into pieces, steps to getting started, as so on.

The interface group was organized into pages by similar UI patterns such as a checklist, tooltips, and empty states. Each page had whatever documentation I had found on the application of that pattern in an onboarding context. For example, the checklists page had it documented that it was best to persist alongside the product as a reminder of tasks to be completed. This then informed a brainstorming workshop the team had about how to encourage users to complete as many of the account setup tasks as possible.

DEVELOP

This research also made an impact when it came to working on the experience for the first time login process. First time login is when users need to set up mobile access to their bank account for the first time. This flow is critical in terms of making a first impression on users and setting expectations and positive sentiment that they’ll carry with them for all future mobile interactions. Being mindful of the research conducted here, we structured onboarding into waves of support sprinkled continuously throughout the app with touchpoints of variable obtrusiveness depending on the importance of the task at hand.