JD UK - App onboarding (iOS)
Introduction
The JD UK app onboarding experience was unbranded, did little to gain trust from users or reassure them that they had downloaded a legitimate JD app.
Project brief: I was tasked with improving the onboarding experience on the iOS App with the intention of implementing onto android, and other fascias in the business.
Acceptance criteria: Must include JD branding, prompts for users to opt in to push notifications, data tracking, location services and to explore how we could encourage account creation and personalisation.
Summary and solution: Initially the journey seemed fairly solutionised before it had come to me. After some deliberation, I decided to explore other possible avenues for the journey that were slightly out of scope to consider future thinking as well as work with the acceptance criteria presented to me.
My role : UX designer
Time frame: 3 weeks
What I did: Competitive benchmarking, User journey mapping, Mid + High fidelity wire-framing, Clickable prototype
Tools: Microsoft Excel, Miro, Figma
Competitive Benchmarking
Analysis of current journey
The current journey looked and felt separated from the JD brand due to the lack of branding applied and felt very intrusive with the way the copy was placed and like the user had little control or understanding as to why all of this information is required.
I then looked at how competitors were presenting their onboarding experience and how they were setting their journeys out by competitive benchmarking.
Competitor Analysis
I started competitive benchmarking in 2 ways. First I created a table to understand what competitors included in their onboarding journeys and then screen recorded and made comments on the experience.
I noticed that we were the only brand to not include any branding on our onboarding journey. Our language was quite robotic, didn’t give users the feeling of much control and did little to gain users trust and reassure them that they had downloaded a legitimate JD app.
Another finding was, that many competitors allowed users to get straight into browsing and didn't force them into signing up or opting in to anything straight away and for one competitor, they had asked if customers were interested in mens or women’s clothing to allow some level of personalisation.
User Journey Maps
With the findings from the competitive benchmarking, I got to thinking about how much information we ask users, without giving them much value in return.
If we were to consider how someone would feel if we tracked them in real life or pushed creating an account without them knowing what value could give them, it would feel intrusive and actually make them feel uncomfortable. In addition to this distrust, strong arming them into creating an account with us, seemed like they would either do so reluctantly or abandon the task.
I decided to try a different approach and user journey mapped 3 different options centered around setting users up with the “why” we are asking for information and how it would affect them to set expectations and understanding.
Option 1 - “Easy” flow
We keep the journey as it is, adding branding, informing users on the way WHY we need this information so that they are aware of it and then prompt users to create an account at the end of their onboarding journey
Option 2 - Account creation as a segue
Similar to option 1, but we tell them more about the benefits of creating a JD account earlier in the process to inform that they can personalise their shopping experience, which would help users understand why we are prompting for data tracking, location services and push notifications
After completing the 2 journey maps above, I still wasn’t convinced that users would be willing to opt in or sign up when we still haven’t really demonstrated much value by this point, so I attempted a 3rd option a little out of the box
Option 3 - Building trust
Users would be given the chance to jump straight into the app to browse the products, see something they'd be interested in buying and maybe even events or promotions and when they add something to a basket or wishlist, they are prompted to log in or create an account.
When they continue to checkout, we tell them delivery options and the option to pick up at their nearest store and prompt them to opt in to location services to see where their nearest stores are.
When their order is completed, they can be asked if they want to opt into notifications so that they can be informed about the status of their orders.
While scenario 3 would take much longer to gain customer insights and relies on the customer finding something of fancy, it feels less intrusive and customers could see how information shared with the app adds value to their purchasing journey.
Review with the stakeholder
After a review with the stakeholder, they agreed that option 3 was the least intrusive and best experience from a user perspective, but from a business perspective, it would be more difficult to prompt for these later if a customer isn’t as captivated by their first shopping experience.
As we were on a tighter time frame, the decision was to roll out what we have currently but with JD branding and better UI and then look to explore option 3 at a later date.
Mid fidelity wireframes
I wire-framed screens for the “quick win” path in Figma using a copy deck provided by the content team and presented the designs back to the stakeholders.
It was flagged that even though users could opt out of location, data tracking and push notifications via the iOS native pop ups at this stage, users would be less likely to opt in later in their native device settings. Ideally we needed to allow them to change these settings via the JD app. Taking this into consideration, I suggested adding a button to the next iteration with the phrase "not now” as a way to nuance that users could change this later in settings.
We also agreed the darker background felt too harsh as the background within the app was a much lighter screen.
High fidelity wireframes and prototype
Taking the feedback from the design review, I made changes and mocked up the screens in high fidelity and made it a clickable prototype for the team to test.
After the team tested and were happy with the functionality the next steps would be to have some users test it via UserTesting platform.
Stats post launch and positive impact
After the new onboarding journey was launched, the registration rate increased significantly on both iOS and android as a result of the onboarding improvements.
“On iOS, the registration rate increased from 9.5% rate to 20.6% ”
iOS
“On Android, the registration rate increased from 12.7% to 24.7% ”