Case Study — Evaluating Bumble’s subscription flow and redesigning it

A UX Research & Design project on enhancing the buying experience of premium subscriptions on Bumble while identifying opportunities to make usability better for the working professionals, leading to increased session lengths and DAU(Daily Active Users) increase | UX Hackathon Case Study

Overview

This case study on Evaluating Bumble’s premium subscription plan is a part of ⏰ 48 hr Design Hackathon (Designathon) where I had to work with a team of 6 members, choose an evaluative problem statement, solve it using the design thinking process and finally present it to the organizers (UX.Anudeep and his Team).

TEAM — DX Badass ( We’re a team of designer’s trying to end bad UX that’s why we’re Badass 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♂️🙅)
1. Debadarshinee (It’s me 👩‍💻)
2. Asha
3. Aditya
4. Shabbir
5. Amrutansu
6. Pushpa — ( Volunteered when we didn’t have enough people to start with )

So this Designathon ( Design + Hackathon) began at checkpoint zero with a kick-off call with Anudeep and his team. And from then we started with the project 🤩. All of us were filled with excitement and curiosity, wanting to work on something amazing together!

Flow: Purchasing the premium plan

Flow Steps: Landing page, Subscription prompt, Subscription category and plans, Payment

User group: Working professional (Age 22- 40yrs) from Tier -1 & Tier- 2 cities

Business Impact: Increase in conversion and retention of DAU

This case study was executed and completed under the guidance of Anudeep Ayyagari (Mentor/UX Designer, Amazon), on a platform supported by Growthschool.

Problem Statement

Evaluate the subscription flow of the Bumble app that includes purchasing a bumble premium subscription and redesigning the experience while identifying opportunities to make usability better for the working professionals which will lead to increased session lengths and DAU increase.

Why did we choose this problem statement?

Our team was figuring out a problem that would challenge us and push our limits. We actually discussed a lot and Chose BookMyShow as our problem statement But again we sat for some time and discussed, and eventually decided to go ahead with Bumble because of the following reasons.

• It was a completely new application for all of us. It was unknown territory for us, So we got excited and thought to understand Bumble from a closer lens. Uncertainty seemed challenging to us.
• The business model is different from other dating apps in terms of being women-centric (Where women make the first move). And it’s not only focused on dating but It has three pillars (Dating, BFF and Business).
• We felt that the user base is different and interesting to study. And we might find something really interesting which we could share with everyone.

Personally, I wanted to do Bumble because I wanted to explore the human psychology behind finding their partners/date. I wanted to understand the the statement “Money can’t buy you love”, but some services claim it could get you more dates which eventually help the person finding love of their life.

Understanding Bumble & its user base?

Bumble is an online dating application. Profiles of potential matches are displayed to users, who can “swipe left” to reject a candidate or “swipe right” to indicate interest. In heterosexual matches, only female users can make the first contact with matched male users, while in same-sex matches either person can send a message first. Wolfe Herd(Founder) has described Bumble as a “feminist dating app”.

The company focuses on people meeting for friendship, dating and business. The company caters to users with the following traits:

• Single working men/women looking to date.
• 22–35yrs looking to make new friends who are staying away from family mostly in Tier 1 & Tier 2 cities or who are new to the city.
• People looking for innovative ways to collaborate for business.

Before jumping on to the solution I wanted to articulate my roles and responsibilities during these 48 hrs.

WHAT DID I DO?

Well, I tried to be involved in almost every single stage and process directly or indirectly. Because I knew in this way I could get the most out of the Hackathon. Even though I contributed throughout the project, there were some places where I had given more of my effort and time.

In the first half of the run — defining the problem statement, working on assumptions & hypotheses, conducting interviews, collecting & analyzing all research, ideating, defining a solution, wireframing and creating flow— where I made my contributions. I wouldn’t say that in all of these stages I made a 100% contribution because this project was driven by team effort where every one of us gave our best.

In the second half of the run with the time running out and exhaustion, and sleeplessness taking control of us, so we changed our approach to be more efficient. So we got divided into groups. Yes group within a group, because time management is also essential. While my team members and I worked on the final UI screens, some of us worked on the presentation by making it fun and organized to read.

Plan of Action and Roles

After we selected our problem, we got together to initiate the plan of action for the team. This was done both to maximize our process and to save time by having different people take up different tasks according to their strengths and preferences. And then we set an approximate timeline to keep ourselves in check and make sure things are done in an orderly manner.

We tried to keep the timeline a little ahead of what we thought. So that we can try our best to meet the deadline before. But in real life that doesn’t happen! I think that’s the beauty of life. And we’re constantly changing our timeline according to the situation and constraints. But FYI we finished the project almost on time. 🥸 yay!!

Actual schedule and Plan of action

Before starting with the approach, let me show the flow of purchasing a subscription plan.

Bumble’s premium subscription flow

It took us some time to understand the flow because all of us were new to this.

Primary flow — Landing page → click on Heart icon → click on See who liked you → Premium/Boost subscription page → Payment

Secondary Flow — Landing page → Right swipe to like profiles → Run out of likes and get a Subscription prompt → Premium/Boost subscription page → Payment

After discussing the flows with teammates we decided to go with the secondary flow as it felt natural to us.

Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics.

Now when the flow is decided it’s time to get our hands dirty! Let's do some Heuristic evaluations.

Jakob’s 10 heuristics evaluation

We also did some non-heuristic/intuition-based evaluations and made Hypotheses. Following are some of them:

Non-heuristic/Intuition-based evaluations

Our hypothesis statements

Secondary Research

We started narrowing down our hypothesis and conducted desk research i.e. looked for reports and research articles to validate our hypothesis. This gave us lots of statistical data to understand our users and their behaviours.

We studied two aspects of secondary research simultaneously -

A. DESK RESEARCH
B. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

We had the following learnings validated through Desk research:

• We hypothesise that if we replace the bumble icon with a relevant icon (an icon showing 3 overlapping cards, it will make more sense to the users because I assume that users can have a better indication of what may happen on the home screen if the icon is descriptive enough.

As per the competitor analysis by looking at what others apps are doing, we found that they use their logo as the home icon (Tinder and Hinge).

Therefore, as per Jakob’s law, Design for patterns to which users are accustomed. Link

• We hypothesise that Instead of Writing coming soon on a prompt we should write the correct timeline Because I assume that users will get a proper estimate of time and they will be more enthusiastic to come back.

Giving exact time decreases user frustration and increases conversion.

• We hypothesise that the Premium Plan should be displayed first instead of the boost as my assumption is users should be provided first with the best plan and then 2nd best plan.

We hypothesise that if we provide users multiple options to go through the payment, the conversion will increase because I assume that users are changing their minds after discovering a complicated payment system.

Making it as easy as possible for your customers to pay is essential for increasing conversions and sales. Supporting Article here.

We hypothesise that if we provide a short period (7 days) free trial subscription because I assume that users will mostly tend to continue the subscription after the free trial

Findings- 54% of Consumers Keep Their Retail Subscriptions Going After Their Free Trial Ends

62% of companies get 10% or more of their business from free trials

16% of companies get more than half of their new business from free trials.

Find this article here .

Another reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341467569_Experience_Effect_in_the_Impact_of_Free_Trial_Promotions

One last thing we thought that could help us in understanding the problem areas of Bumble in the premium subscription is the Play /App store reviews. So we looked for reviews regarding the subscription plans and came across these. ⬇️

Competitive Analysis

We studied two competitors (Tinder and Hinge) in the dating app industry.

Following are some insights from these apps.

Competitive Analysis of Tinder

Competitive Analysis of Hinge

Target Users

After collecting data through secondary research, we went through more articles to define our target users. Based on the sources, we came to the following conclusion -

User Group

Product / industry —Dating app / IT industry

Ratio — Male:Female — 40:60

Age — 22 to 35 yrs

Occupation — Working professional

Demography — People from Tier 1 and Tier 2 city.

Type of Users — 1. User looking for partner for dating and also looking for company and friendship.
2. Person is fond of outgoing in nature.
3. User is enthusiatic about trying new things in certainity.
4. They are very much familar to social media platforms.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

For our primary research, we found a few participants who agreed to do the usability testing of the Bumble app. Since we were in a time crunch, our team decided to contact our friends and to reduce bias, we made sure that no individual interviewed their friend. We prepared a questionnaire so that we can get relevant data from the users.

1. Tasks for the user — From the home menu, swipe left or right till you get a prompt for Subscription. Choose & buy a Premium subscription.
2. Points to observe -

• How user feels when asked to purchase the plan to get more likes/ features
• The purchasing behaviour of the user?
• How is the user interacting with the Landing page/ user profile page?
• Which plan user selects from the subscription

Following is the questionnaire which was used by every member to conduct the interviews.

Ice breaking questions

• Age
• Occupation
• Demographic

Probing & Exploratory questions for users during testing

• When did you see the subscription page during your usage of the app? which subscription model did you see — boost or premium
• How did you find the process from subscription notification to payment?
• What did you feel about the subscription plan?
• If you had to take a subscription then for what features would it have been
• If you had to take the subscription then which plan would you have chosen and why
• Were you able to see & understand all the features of the subscription?
• What did you feel about the payment option? Would multiple payment options make the experience better?
• What do you feel about getting a free trial subscription?

We interviewed 5 users and conducted usability testing of the current subscription flow of Bumble. It was really interesting to observe how users are interacting with the product. We also took notes of where users got difficulties. Following are some insights from the user testing:

After all these overwhelming insights we narrowed down and started picking up points which got validated through our testing and secondary research.

Hypothesis Validations through research (Primary+Secondary) zoomed in

Now it’s time for the ideation part. 👩‍🎨 We started ideation for the issues identified during the previous section of analysing insights from research. First, we started framing the How Might We questions.

We framed HMW questions for the issues and kept ideating for each of these HMW questions.

Some of the HMW questions were as follows:

🤔 HMW increase the visibility of the premium subscription plan so it is easily accessible for the user?

1. We can put the premium subscription under the hamburger menu.
2. Add a label/icon on the top left of profiles indicating no.1 benefit
3. Add a pro or a tick label on other persons’ cards so that their profiles will be different
4. Send notification about someone liking the user from which the user will get the prompt “ to see who liked you buy premium ”
5. Give the users some free features and give prompts when they run out of it.
6. Add an icon of ‘Premium’ at the bottom Menu bar
7. giving prompts to the user that “someone just bought this plan”

🤔 HMW make the premium subscription easy to find for the user?

1. Plans to be kept in horizontal incremental order for clear comparison
2. decreasing the price of subscription but with more features
3. Use confetti while prompting the premium subscription behind the popup.
4. Highlighting the recommended plan according to the usage by the user.
5. Give people a money-back guarantee if they don’t like it.
6. Customization of plans according to the usage

🤔 HMW make plan comparison distinct and clear between different plans?

1. After clicking on the plans inform the user what services you are giving them with that plan.
2. Highlighting the best value plan / Frequently bought
3. Comparing plans side by side or give a CTA “ compare plans that best suited for you”

🤔 HMW enable the user to see full premium features without a hit-n-trial learning curve?

1. The bottom right corner star option should lead to premium in a single tap
2. give them a clear info button stating where the comparison page is
3. A comparison plan can be shown upfront so the user can be given the choices all at once

🤔 HMW ensure the user continues to use the subscription even after the trial period ends?

1. Renaming the continue button to ‘view pricing’ as it seems to have more impact https://databox.com/converting-trial-users-to-paid-customers
2. “By turning the ‘Upgrade Now’ button to a much more discreet ‘View Pricing’ link, we saw a significant increase in people completing their cards and making it through to sending and purchasing.”
3. Show them the full potential of the platform
4. Make payment mandatory for trial and tell them the status that they can cancel.
5. “If you’re clear about it during sign-up and make the opt-out straightforward, you can be confident that any users you retain are because you successfully demonstrated value during the free period.”
6. Offer discount at the end of the trial
7. Highlight the benefits they unlocked after the trial starts so they can feel more personal
8. Give users a premium badge.
9. Indicate Bumble branding on top of the landing page as ‘Bumble basic — Bumble Boost — Bumble Premium.

Wireframing

We referred to ideas and user insights to add more features to the wireframe. The layout was changed for some screens after inspiration from a similar feature in another app.

Initial user flows and Iteration

Addition of referral plan in the iterated wireframe

During ideation, the team was able to provide many ideas and features via inspiration from features or concepts used in various applications.

Tik-Tok⏳ … time is running out, One of our members reminded us and advised us to do the prototypes for the usability testing. So we started working on the prototype keeping deadline in mind. One of our team members had already prepared components as exact as Bumble. So it was pretty quick to make a prototype at this stage.

Figma Components

First Prototype for Usability testing

• A more detailed popup to show more about the premium beforehand
  gives the user control if he wants to view the premium or not firsthand.
• Pricing cards needed work as they were not intuitively scannable. We made cards better so they were scannable quickly without taking attention.
• To introduce DAU and session length we planned to offer a free subscription based on referral which would eventually also impact the conversion and re-impacting DAU and average time spent.

Usability Testing of the Prototype

We conducted a round of testing with our users who had provided insights during initial usability testing for primary research. The users were made to go through the user flow and asked to talk out loud. Users shared their screens while performing the task and gave insights at each step.

Revised Prototype

Basis the insights received from the users in usability testing, the team discussed the feasibility and implications of the feedback and accordingly the revised prototype was made.

📝 Major takeaways from this project

I was completely new to this experience (sleeplesness, exhustion, excitement etc.) as it was my first ever hackathon project. I didn’t expect to get an immense amount of learning from this 48 hrs. It was an amazing experience to work with my teammates. We had arguments and disagreements but yes, we were all passionate about our project and were able to finish it off on time! 🥳

1. Teamwork helps us to divide work and helps us if we get stuck in something. This project helped us develop valuable team-building skills.
2. We cannot solve every problem. We should be focusing on the important which will have more impact.
3. we should avoid a perfectionist mentality as we have a deadline for the project.
4. Documentation is really important. It saved us time writing this case study and learning from our mistakes.
5. The frameworks provided are not the holy grail of truth. We must be ready to change our approach depending on the situation, resources and time.
6. As a team, we should take out time to know the strengths of each person. That can bring out the best in the entire team.
7. We are not the user and should keep our biases aside while conducting interviews.
8. We also understood the need to disagree and commit.

Future Scope of Work

1. In future, we can give integrated options to users to book tables and movies straight from the chat.
2. To increase the session length and motivate users to join the premium, we thought of giving 1 premium feature for trial so that new users get to spend some amount of time on the app.

Thanks for reading till the end. It would mean a lot to me if you could long press on the clap icon, drop a few comments & show your support. Do reach out to me on LinkedIn for any feedback, discussions or collaborations, I’d be more than happy to have a chat with you! ☺️