Payper — Onboarding Case Study

When you’re a peer-to-peer recurring payment company and only 26% of your users have added a bank account, you have an issue. This case study shows how my team looked to solve that issue.

The Design Process

EMPATHY

The following user responses and feelings were gathered from a “Talk Aloud” usability test session where each user was asked to go through the new user onboarding process. From the interviews a few things became apparent. Namely parts of the user onboarding experience that we could redesign to better fit the needs of our users.

Monis

“You want the user to feel like they came to the app and got something done”

Desires

· On-boarding tutorial needs to be so quick its not annoying

· Inviting your friends & starting payments should be very easy

· Starting a payment with an un-invited friend should be intuitive

Connor

“Give me a better explanation of Micro-deposits”

Desires

· Provide a better explanation of Micro-deposits

· Provide Notifications for time sensitive events

· Provide more professional language in the app. Ensure my security.

Cathy

“Give me a tutorial, show me how to use the app after I create an account”

Desires

· Send me reminders

· Let me know I’m secure

· Let me get into the app faster

Jake

“Give me a feel for the app before asking me for sensitive information”

Desires

· Micro deposits need to be explained better

· Provide value before asking for sensitive information

· The Status Bar needs should accurately reflect where the user progress is in the onboarding process

Conclusion

· Give novice users a more guided user onboarding experience

· Speed up the user onboarding process

· Prove providing sensitive information to Payper is risk free and secure with social proof and precise language

The culmination of these pain points quickly revealed, going through the user onboarding process was inefficient and plagued with insecurities for our users.

DEFINE

An overview of our current user onboarding flow

1. Facebook sign up or Generic sign up — Retrieve basic information from user

2. Know Your Customer (KYC) — Retrieve sensitive information for verifying identity

3.) Extra Onboarding Steps — Fallback screens users would see when prompted to

The Data

76% of users complete sign up & Know Your Customer(KYC) processes

26% of users added a bank account

The Problem

After completing the above length sign up process the new user would be given access to the application. Depending on whether or not their identity had been verified they could then go on to add their bank account. However, if there was an issue with verifying their identity they would have to go through an extra step where they had to upload a sensitive document to Dwolla to verify their identity.

What are the issues with the user onboarding process?

1. User interest drops after completion of sign up processes
2. User Onboarding process is slowed at multiple steps
3. High potential for failing Know Your Customer
4. Fragmented Micro-deposit screen scares away potential users
5. Detached Bank Onboarding provides another step beyond the exhausting sign up process
6. We believed every user was the same. We thought they would want to send money and receive money
7. We treated completing Know your Customer (KYC) as the most important part of new user onboarding. We thought a high KYC completion percentage rate indicated a successful onboarding experience, clearly it did not.

• Initial metrics showed this was somewhat successful. Most users completed KYC
• We learned KYC completion was the wrong metric to be increasing

Where do we need to be?

1. Users to complete the entire user onboarding process
2. Provide more efficient and pleasant user onboarding experience
3. Make user onboarding more engaging
4. Retain more users

How do we define a successful user onboarding experience?

1. What % increase in users completing the onboarding process demonstrates a positive experience? 100% is unlikely, but is 10% acceptable?

2. Do our users feel they have a good understanding of the onboarding process?

3. An increase in users completing the onboarding process should show we are

Conclusion

The KYC focused onboarding flow shown above worked for us in terms of what our partner Dwolla needed to create peer to peer payment accounts, but proved exhausting for our users. Most users felt insecure providing their personal information. They needed more social proof and to see how the app actually worked. We needed to pick an onboarding flow that met our user’s desires as well as Dwolla’s requirements. We needed to understand that we had different users with different desires.

IDEATE

Making onboarding faster; Detangling the Onboarding experience

As we observed, KYC isn’t king, and Dwolla allows users to create bank accounts that can send money without needing to verify their identity. We can use this to our advantage! We can make onboarding faster by decoupling KYC making it an optional requirement for receiving money.

1. Shorten the account creation process by removing KYC from process. Generic Sign up and Facebook Sign up would remain.
2. Redesign the status card to more accurately depict allow their onboarding progress. The first step is switched to adding a bank account

Providing a more transparent reflection of a new user’s onboarding status

We originally had a status card that was actionable. We wanted to create a more contextual status card that would make each necessary step the user had left in user onboarding transparent.

The status card needed to be as transparent as possible; Answering the following the questions.

1. How far along is the user in their on-boarding process?
2. Could the user send money?
3. Could the user receive money?

Status Card Whiteboard Session

During this whiteboard session, we looked at the structure of our database and extracted onboarding_status and customer status fields we would used to determine onboarding_progress.

Breaking down each case of onboarding progress we could better alert the user to their onboarding_progress in the form of percentages. The user would also be alerted to the action they could take.

Envisioning a more secure onboarding flow; helping users feel safe

To make our users feel more secure we looked at the specific screens that were causing users worry, namely the following…

1. Social Security Screen
2. Document Upload Screen
3. Micro deposit Verification Screen

Social Security Number Input Screen

On the screen where we asked users to input their Social Security Number we needed to come up with a way to ensure that they would feel secure. To do this we looked up conventions on conveying security. From apps such as Venmo to apps like Robinhood . We settled on an aesthetic similar to Robinhood’s opting to show a small insignia and verify to the user that we were a safe and secure company.

Document Upload Screen

In terms of making the Document Upload Screen feel more secure we thought aboutabout ways non-invasive ways we could be transparent with users while not providing a wall of text.

We researched mobile applications that require user payment to see what possible insights we could gained. We discovered alert modals were a convenient way to convey information and looked for the added a guide to the screen to explain what the information would be used for and why the personal identification documents were needed.

Micro-deposit Verification Screen

Incentivizing users to continue on-boarding process with rewards

We held a sprint meeting wherein the end goal was to make the user feel successful after completing the lengthy KYC and Bank Onboarding. Originally a user would complete bank onboarding and be taken directly to the main screen of the app. At this point it was up to the end-user to figure out what to do with the app.

We thought this was incorrect. We received numerous reports from users that they were initially confused after they set up their bank account. What were they to do next? They didn’t feel a sense of direction.

The question became, how do we associate completing certain tasks with a reward such that they want to continue progressing through the steps they needed to take. We want the user to feel good after completing an action. We want them to feel like continuing. We wanted to excite them

PROTOTYPE

Making onboarding faster

The beauty of using React-Native is that most of our design has been modular. Email and signup was its own component, similarly the KYC portion and Bank onboarding portion had their own components.

Redesigned Status Card

Lof-Fi Status Card Mockups

Hi-Fi Status Card

Redesigned Bank Account Guide

Lo-Fi Bank Account Guide Mockups

Hi-Fi Bank Account Guide

Redesigned Micro-deposit Guide

Lo-Fi Micro-deposit Mockups

Hi-Fi Micro-deposit Guide

Incentivizing users to continue on-boarding process

Taking the lootbox concept from games like Overwatch, I created mockups for reward screens after the user successfully completed adding a bank account, and completing Know Your Customer (KYC)

Lo-Fi Bank Account Added Incentive

Hi-Fi KYC Completed + Bank Account Added Incentive

TEST

The joy of being on the appstore and being able to codepush updates means that we could push these changes to our users on the appstore. After 2 weeks passed we saw a 20% increase in users who added their bank account. We also received testimonials that the new onboarding experience was much more transparent, and easier to navigate.