How would you improve the onboarding conversion of Revolut by 15%?

This interview question assessed your ability to diagnose problems, test hypotheses and tweak your product strategy planning skills.

What are interviewers looking for?

• Problem-solving skills — Are you able to apply critical thinking to question every assumption? How will you approach the issue?
• Execution skills — After identifying the product problems, how will you resolve the issues? Using product design to prioritize root causes, and propose logical and creative solutions.
• Communication — The interview should be a 2-way interaction. You have to lay out your approach to check-in with interviewers.

How to approach?

I would like to leverage structured thinking to break this question into smaller, manageable parts by the following 4 steps:

• Clarify the situation
• Organize the available information
• Reveal gaps and opportunity
• Identify options

Clarify the questions

I understand that the goal is to increase the onboarding conversion rate on Revolut. However, before I jump in, I’d like to get some clarity on a couple of things.

• Platform — Is there any particular platform that I should target? If you allow me to decide, I will target the mobile app because of the user impact size. Mobile (iOS & Android) apps have much more active users.
• Market — I will target the UK as it represents a large percentage of Revolut users. Or, is there any particular country that I should target?
• Period of time — I want to clarify if we’re thinking about growth in the 6-month time frame or the 3-year time frame. The former would suggest smaller quick-win initiatives (eg. improving conversion rates on existing funnels) while the latter probably requires larger strategic investments. Here, let’s assume we are diving into a 6-month time frame.
• Metric — In terms of increasing the onboarding conversion by 15%, how is the conversion measured? Is it from user sign-up to KYC or Deposit? Here, let’s assume we are optimizing the user sign-up to the first transaction. The first transaction is only considering outbound transactions (stock purchase, crypto trading.).
• User Journey — How is the onboarding flow defined? Can you walk me through the existing onboarding funnel? Let’s assume there are 8 steps within the conversion funnel.

Organize information

Now, I am going to organize the information that I have.

• Business goal: Optimize the onboarding conversion funnel and remove user friction and enhance user experience.
• Target Audience: UK market and app users only.
• Success Metrics: Sign-up to first transaction conversion rate by 15% within 6 months.
• Guardrail Metrics: On the other hand, I don’t just want to drive onboarding conversion increases without ensuring that our customers are having a great experience. So in addition to the customer journey, I want to include some customer health and guardrail metrics. I will pick up the KYC pass rate, paying new customers churn rate (new customers who canceled the paid subscription in the next month.)
• User journey: The existing onboarding conversion funnel is as follows.

Revolut onboarding conversion funnel

Reveal gaps and opportunity

In order to optimize the onboarding conversion funnel, I will start looking for high drop-off pages. There are 3 main pages with a high drop-off rate.

• 11% of users exited on the Selfie page
• 13% of users existed on the Subscription selection page
• 13% of users existed on the checkout page

Next, I am going to identify the possible user problems through the onboarding journey. I will collect the following data points to break down the user problems on these pages.

[Selfie page]

• [No intention] How many users left the page without any interaction (click, scroll)?
• [Camera access] How many users failed to turn on the camera or were blocked by camera access?
• [Selfie upload errors] How many users were unable to upload selfies? Review the error codes to scope down the issues by image size exceed, app crash, unable to capture the user’s face.

[Subscription selection page]

• [No intention] How many users left the page without any interaction (click, scroll)? What’s the default page that we are showing? This is to back up my assumption that users are still in the consideration phase and we haven’t gained user’s trust and helped them to visualize how would the product fit their lives and users thought that we are a paid service.
• [With intention] Out of the churn users, How many of them switch between 2 plans before drop off? Users probably were unable to tell the difference between these plans.

[Checkout page]

• [Psychological costs] Out of 3 plans, which has the highest drop-off rate? My gut feeling is that the paid plan will have the higher drop-off rate as users don’t want to pay at this point and they want to look around.
• [Change the plan] How many people click on the back button to change the plan and card options?
• [Unable to pay] For those users who had the intention to proceed with payment, users might not have credit cards with them. Hence, they left.
• [Payment errors] Unable to proceed with payments due to 3rd party payment authentication issue?

Considering we are diving into short-term initiatives specific to increasing the onboarding conversion funnel.

I will prioritize the user problems on the subscription selection and checkout page over the selfie page as there were 13% of users dropped off which was higher than the selfie page drop off (~11%).

Another idea to back up my decision is that the user problems on the subscription selection and checkout pages are much more important to be anchored. The key issue we are facing is about “How to reduce user’s psychological costs and guide them to move on to the next step”. However, the issues on the selfie page are more related to UX problems. So, I will categorize the proposed changes as quick wins in my product strategy planning.

Identify options

I am going to brainstorm solutions to tackle the psychological costs on the subscription selection and checkout page.

Theme 1: Simplify the subscription selection and checkout process

Problems: The current onboarding flow is too lousy. New users have to go through 6 steps to browse the Revolut service on the homepage.

Hypothesis: Given new users haven’t built trust in Revolut’s service yet, there’s a lower chance to convert new users to paying users through the onboarding flow by guiding them to check out the subscription. Also, choosing a subscription plan and completing checkout is not mandatory in the onboarding process. By removing the subscription and checkout process from the onboarding flow, there’s a high likelihood that new users will be converted to make the first outbound transaction.

Success metric impact: Increase sign-up to first transaction conversion.

Proposed solutions:

• Remove the subscription plan selection, Revolut card, and checkout pages
• New users will default to the standard plan (Free), virtual card option.
• Plan an A/B experiment to test this idea cause this requires a big change in the onboarding flow.

Theme 2: Guide users to complete selfie

Problems: There were 11% of users dropping off from the Selfie page. After reviewing the data, the majority of users failed due to camera issues.

Success metric impact: Increase Selfie to KYC identity conversion

There are 2 directions we can consider:

[Solution A]

Hypothesis: Adding the selfie upload from the album option will assist users who encountered camera issues to complete the selfie upload.

Proposed solutions:

• Add the Select selfie from the album option on the page
• Get the album access from the OS

[Solution B]

Hypothesis: Adding the selfie guidance on the page will increase the Selfie upload completion rate

Proposed solutions:

• Add the Do and Don’t tips on the page (e.g. make sure your face is visible, and eyes are open, do not upload ID, do not apply filters, do not wear sunglasses.)
• Add the selfie example
• Add the file size reminder
• For those we didn’t grant the camera access, guide the users on how to enable it in the device settings.

Summary

In the beginning, I started with the clarification questions to scope down the interview questions which helped me to better understand the current user journey flow.

Next, I analyzed the onboarding conversion funnel and focus on the pages with a high drop-off rate. There are 3 pages which are the selfie, subscription selection, and checkout page.

I decided to optimize the subscription and checkout process as the user problems are more critical than the selfie page. The issues are centered around user trust, however, the selfie page issues are about UX problems which are easier to be resolved.

In my implementation plan, there are 2 themes. The first theme is about simplification. Considering the subscription and checkout process need more user education and more triggers to promote product value to new users. I recommend removing these 2 steps from the onboarding test and building an A/B testing experiment to test my hypothesis.

The second theme is about user guidance on the selfie page. There are 2 solutions to be proposed, one is to add the image upload from the album option and another one is to add tips on the page to guide users on how to upload selfies and convert them into the next steps.