Creating lasting habits for FT Edit through enhanced onboarding experiences

Role

Over the last couple of months of 2022, I led design, defined user experiences through prototyping and testing and collaborated with stakeholders.

Team

Dilyana Evtimova - Product Manager

Maia Bridi - User Researcher

Alice Bartlett - Principal Engineer

Me - Product Designer (part time)

Outcome

After leaving the FT in December, iterations of my designs were launched in late February and improved retention and engagement with articles within the first week.

Process

Understand
Ideate
Iterate
Test

PROBLEM

In the first 6 months, almost 50% of users only opened the FT edit app once. Less than half of that same 50% open an article, with even less scrolling to read an article.

How might we improve communication with users in their onboarding experience to encourage article views.

UNDERSTAND

Context

What is the ‘FT Edit’?

The iOS app curates 8 in-depth stories daily from FT's best reporting and analysis to create a focused reading experience, allowing users to have a focused reading experience. Read about its first year here.

Business opportunities

As part of our process of determining product market fit, revisiting the onboarding and first load experience could potentially improve retention of active users and increase subscriptions.

Objective

Explore, understand and test how we communicate curation during onboarding.

Ideation workshop

Maia, user researcher, planned and led an ideation workshop with all stakeholders, pulling user insights into the focus of our combined ideation efforts. This collaborative approach resulted in a shared understanding of desirability and feasibility with a our users at the forefront.

Weighing up effort vs impact enabled the strategic decision to focus on how we communicate curation with users.

Secondary research

With a few ideas already discussed as a team, I decided to explore other concepts and understand users behaviour so I could build on the ideas from the workshop.

Starting with the data, drop off points showed:

  • 12% of users dropped off at the splash screen!

  • More than 53% don’t make it to an article after going through onboarding!

  • 56% of users don’t scroll through the whole homepage experience to reach the ‘end card’!

Key competitor & comparator observations:

  • Section headings to visually separate topics and interests

  • Instructional copy writing and tone can be key in making the experience feel familiar / human

  • Offering the right balance of content can prevent users from feeling underwhelmed

  • Content tags and filtering give users a sense of control in a personalised homepage.

IDEATE

Concepts

I created several rapid concept sketches to help visualise ideas, later creating accompanying mid fidelity wireframes with UI variations.

  • Concept 1:
    Onboarding style walkthrough

  • Concept 2:
    Replace stand first within articles

  • Concept 3:
    Ad-hoc intro cards to introduce articles

  • Concept 4:
    Back swiping to get to a daily note from editors

  • Concept 5:
    Scrolling horizontal sections

  • Concept 6:
    Building editions select to create filtered views

  • Concept 7:
    Highlight top story as largest card

Concept development & alignment

Presenting these back to the team and editorial stakeholders, we collectively deduced which ideas were worth pursuing further. To bring the engineering team closer to the discovery and ideation process, I repeated this step and collaborated with them to enable strategic decision-making on testing and early iterations of viable ideas.

Concept 3:

Concept 4:

Concept 7:

Combining concepts:

Developing UI & interactions

Building on the previous visual identity, I explored animating existing assets within the onboarding cards to add delight and points of interest when users swipe through the carousel.

Feedback and further collaborative sessions with the cross functional team helped to refine the overall concept, using insights from both engaged and disengaged users.

Key developments:

  • Animating onboarding interactions

  • Separating instructional cards from informative cards

  • A card to introduce core themes and topics

  • Close and recall onboarding cards to cater to different users

  • Making the existing end card editable to connect to the next edition

ITERATE

Embedding onboarding

Due to significant drop of rates in the onboarding journey, we were facing increasing pressure from stakeholders to remove steps completely. Rather than scrapping onboarding entirely, I decided to quickly adapt the work I was developing to embed onboarding in the curation cards.

To accommodate users who want to explore right away, I embedded the onboarding steps into cards in the carousel so that more users could reach articles before ending their first session and also provide clarity on what to expect from the FT edit app.

Finalising designs

Content mapping

Collating feedback from fellow designers and the team created instances of repetitive copy when looking at the whole experience. To resolve this, Maia and I worked together to map copy through the journey, so we could confidently test with users and iterate later.

TEST

Defining success metrics

With everyone aligned on designs and product goals, we still needed to agree on how we should test and measure the impact of the changes.

As the idea had evolved significantly from the ideation workshop, Dilyana had to establish the most effective approach to defining testing. To accomplish this, I created multiple user flows for each key change, factoring in various user types. These visual references expedited decision-making and facilitated alignment between the product manager, data analyst and engineers in determining the feasibility and viability of measuring success metrics.

IMPACT

Before I left the FT in December 2022, we’d been able to:

  • Establish how to technically deliver the editable end card

  • Start building the new onboarding experience in the carousel

I saw the onboarding variant mid February 2023.

An A/B test proved the cards were successful at retaining active users as:

  • Day-1 retention improved by 48%

  • 8 card carousel view improved by 5%

  • Article CTR increased by 7%

Reflections

Important lessons learned:

  • Deciding whether to take bigger risks by overhauling an complete experience vs making small incremental changes is a hard decision for any PM. As a designer, I can support this choice by creating components and splitting up an experience, however for future projects I believe it is crucial to establish a shared understanding of risk from the outset, enabling the entire team to be more productive and effective in their contributions.

  • Maintaining close communication with editorial stakeholders was critical for the success of this project. Any gaps in their understanding of the project could result in unexpected requirements and impede the design process. Causing me to spend more time attempting to incorporate untested design additions without adequate time to validate their value with users.

  • Joining the team with discovery and ideation phases already underway and only able to offer part-time support, meant it was not conducive to challenge everything from the outset. However, if I had translated design requests, research findings, and the underlying rationale into a comprehensive design brief, it would have facilitated a smoother transition into conceptualising and designing. This approach would have also provided clarity and context to my decisions and design process, enabling me to remain focused on business and user needs aligned to a specific goal.

How I would approach the same task:

  • Like a lot product people, I endeavour to remove my biases and personal preference from decision making. Pushing to carve out time to testing early designs and concepts to help validate ideas and bring valuable user insights back into my discovery process, enabling informed decisions that prioritise users' needs and preferences, rather than relying solely on subjective opinions.

  • Linking user goals with product metrics would enhance my ability to address design choices' functionality and optimise my ideation process's outcomes.