After making a revised onboarding circulate for a fintech app, my design staff had simply three days to check and fine-tune it for our shopper. As a result of we didn’t have sufficient time to collect consumer suggestions, I wanted one other method to shortly refine the circulate and reveal its impression.
I developed an evaluation technique to streamline the onboarding steps and quantify how a lot easier they’d turn into. After I introduced the up to date circulate to the shopper, they authorized our design, and we instantly carried out the adjustments.
Since then, I’ve used the identical approach to strengthen current consumer flows for extra shoppers. It’s a easy technique that saves time, improves usability, and exhibits the effectiveness of your design choices to stakeholders.
Consumer Stream Evaluation in 4 Steps
Consumer flows map out the trail a consumer should take to finish a process, corresponding to onboarding, subscribing, and checkout. Designers might make consumer flows in the course of the product growth course of or as a part of common UX evaluation after a product has launched (particularly when updates and new options are carried out).
A product’s consumer circulate is vital to UX, and it ought to be used alongside consumer analysis and user path analytics. The Interplay Design Basis underscores its significance: “The higher you facilitate the consumer shifting from begin to end on a selected course of—the better the product is to work with and the extra possible that you’re to ship an superior consumer expertise.”
Any designer or design staff can make use of this four-step circulate evaluation to reinforce UX and assist customers full duties that help enterprise targets. As an example, I’ll apply the approach to an app onboarding instance.
Map the Present Course of
Step one is to look at the consumer path by noting every motion required to finish the duty, corresponding to gestures, face scans, or viewing updates like snackbars. Right here’s the onboarding circulate instance labeled with every step the consumer takes. On this case, the circulate makes use of 5 actions: wait, scroll, faucet, sort, and comply with an exterior hyperlink. Whether or not you create a digital consumer circulate or a bodily one with boards and sticky notes, it’s useful to position the motion labels close to the associated screens (or display screen representations) to visualise the steps.
This instance circulate entails many steps throughout a number of screens, and it’s clear that it must be streamlined. However the variety of actions isn’t the one measure of how demanding a course of is for the consumer. Some steps are extra taxing than others. For instance, it takes extra bodily effort to sort than to faucet. To guage the consumer circulate, we’d like a method to quantify every motion.
Rank Actions by Complexity
The following step is to contemplate the time and psychological or bodily effort every step requires. For instance, deciding between two choices demands mental energy, even for seemingly small choices. Alternatively, typing takes physical effort (significantly on cellular). Different actions might solely take psychological effort with no bodily motion, corresponding to ready for a snackbar to vanish. The mixed psychological and bodily effort that customers should take to achieve their targets is the interaction cost.
I like to recommend creating a easy hierarchy for the actions in your consumer circulate, from best to hardest. Figuring out an motion’s problem is much like rating the severity of usability issues: As a result of subjectivity is concerned, you want constant standards (on this case, time and psychological and bodily effort) when evaluating the actions in opposition to each other. (When you have the chance, observe customers working with the prototype to assist affirm your rankings.)
Subsequent, assign every motion a colour and a degree worth. I choose crimson for probably the most difficult and grey for the best. The harder an motion is to finish, the upper its level worth ought to be. Right here’s how I broke down the actions in our consumer circulate instance:
There could also be variable complexity even with the identical exercise. Scrolling will normally be a easy process, however what if a consumer is scrolling to learn a sophisticated authorized doc? In that case, you would create a label that displays the complexity higher, corresponding to Learn.
In the event you’re working with a staff in particular person, strive placing the screens up on a board and utilizing colourful sticky notes for the motion labels. This can be a enjoyable method to visualize the consumer circulate as a bunch and see the method from a brand new perspective. For distant collaboration, strive on-line whiteboard instruments like FigJam or Miro.
When you’ve labeled every motion, multiply its assigned worth by the variety of occasions it seems within the circulate. You’ll be able to then add the factors for every motion collectively to create what I name an “effort complete.” (We’ll speak extra about what this quantity means later once we measure impression.)
Streamline the Consumer Stream
When you’ve calculated a baseline effort complete, return by the consumer circulate and establish locations you might be able to mix or simplfy steps. Concentrate on lowering the variety of actions or changing advanced actions with easier ones. As an example, you may usually cut back tapping by combining screens. That stated, it’s finest to not merge screens that comprise advanced info. For instance, customers might get overwhelmed in case you have cost and consumer info fields on the identical display screen. That’s why it’s higher to intention to lower complexity moderately than deal with lowering the variety of screens.
You may also incorporate automation to ease the consumer’s burden. As an example, an app may robotically fill in a safety code despatched through textual content or detect the consumer’s nation so that they don’t have to sort it.
In our consumer circulate instance, screens two by 5 are advertising and marketing microcopy and a welcome message. There’s no want to make use of a number of screens for that info, so we will mix them. You would additionally make the keyboard robotically open every time there’s a display screen with an enter subject so the consumer doesn’t need to faucet earlier than typing. Some enter fields could be mixed into one display screen, such because the username and e-mail tackle. Whereas not relevant in our instance, one other method to make onboarding extra environment friendly is to incorporate superior options, corresponding to permitting customers to scan cost playing cards as an alternative of typing the credentials.
Lowering this circulate from 15 screens to seven makes it simpler for the consumer to finish the important process of account setup. Most apps don’t need extensive onboarding processes or explanations. As an alternative, it’s finest to maintain onboarding transient and targeted on mandatory steps.
Calculate Impression
Chances are you’ll have to show to your shopper or different stakeholders that the streamlined consumer circulate you’ve created is value implementing. For instance, the shopper might be hesitant to take away onboarding screens that showcase the app’s many options. In the event you obtain pushback in your proposed adjustments, it’s finest to help your case with numbers. Spotlight the variety of customers who go away the app earlier than finishing onboarding, or who obtain the app and don’t use it once more. You may also share examples of apps which have extra seamless onboarding flows with the shopper to reveal the distinction in expertise.
Even additional, with this consumer circulate evaluation technique you may quantify the impression of the improved circulate. To do that, calculate the whole effort rating of the brand new model, and examine it to the unique rating.
Understanding the trouble scores of each consumer flows, we will quantify a change in usability between the 2 variations and use the result to help our design choices to stakeholders. To take action, merely divide the distinction between the brand new and unique flows (29 factors) by the primary rating (78 factors) and multiply by 100. Within the case of our instance, the brand new onboarding circulate is 37% easier than the unique.
I wish to share the adjustments with shoppers in a presentation to underscore the impression of the updates and the logic behind eradicating actions or steps. Testing the circulate with just a few customers can assist you validate the outcomes of the design course of. If wanted, you may repeat all 4 steps to additional streamline the circulate.
A Extra Environment friendly Product Improvement Course of
After utilizing this technique, affirm that the circulate equips customers to efficiently navigate the product and obtain their targets by gathering suggestions. As well as, analytics will present the place customers go away the product or fail to finish a process and any adjustments within the bounce charge as a result of updates. With the fintech app I first tried this system on, we decided by qualitative testing that customers have been glad with the brand new onboarding course of and didn’t expertise interruptions when the product was up to date.
I’ve discovered that this four-step consumer circulate evaluation approach is a fast, efficient approach to enhance UX and maximize effectivity within the product growth course of. Use it to simplify duties for customers and to quantify the impression of your design choices.
