After making a revised onboarding circulation for a fintech app, my design crew had simply three days to check and fine-tune it for our shopper. As a result of we didn’t have sufficient time to collect consumer suggestions, I wanted one other option to shortly refine the circulation and exhibit its affect.
I developed an evaluation methodology to streamline the onboarding steps and quantify how a lot less complicated they’d change into. Once I introduced the up to date circulation to the shopper, they accredited our design, and we instantly applied the modifications.
Since then, I’ve used the identical method to strengthen current consumer flows for extra purchasers. It’s a easy methodology that saves time, improves usability, and exhibits the effectiveness of your design selections to stakeholders.
Consumer Stream Evaluation in 4 Steps
Consumer flows map out the trail a consumer should take to finish a process, reminiscent of onboarding, subscribing, and checkout. Designers might make consumer flows through the product growth course of or as a part of common UX evaluation after a product has launched (particularly when updates and new options are applied).
A product’s consumer circulation is crucial to UX, and it needs to be used alongside consumer analysis and consumer path analytics. The Interplay Design Basis underscores its significance: “The higher you facilitate the consumer shifting from begin to end on a selected course of—the simpler the product is to work with and the extra seemingly that you’re to ship an superior consumer expertise.”
Any designer or design crew can make use of this four-step circulation evaluation to improve UX and assist customers full duties that assist enterprise targets. As an example, I’ll apply the method to an app onboarding instance.
Map the Present Course of
Step one is to look at the consumer path by noting every motion required to finish the duty, reminiscent of gestures, face scans, or viewing updates like snackbars. Right here’s the onboarding circulation instance labeled with every step the consumer takes. On this case, the circulation makes use of 5 actions: wait, scroll, faucet, sort, and observe an exterior hyperlink. Whether or not you create a digital consumer circulation or a bodily one with boards and sticky notes, it’s useful to put the motion labels close to the associated screens (or display screen representations) to visualise the steps.
This instance circulation entails many steps throughout a number of screens, and it’s clear that it must be streamlined. However the variety of actions isn’t the one measure of how demanding a course of is for the consumer. Some steps are extra taxing than others. For instance, it takes extra bodily effort to sort than to faucet. To judge the consumer circulation, we’d like a option to quantify every motion.
Rank Actions by Complexity
The subsequent step is to think about the time and psychological or bodily effort every step requires. For instance, deciding between two choices calls for psychological power, even for seemingly small selections. However, typing takes bodily effort (significantly on cell). Different actions might solely take psychological effort with no bodily motion, reminiscent of ready for a snackbar to vanish. The mixed psychological and bodily effort that customers should take to succeed in their targets is the interplay price.
I like to recommend growing a easy hierarchy for the actions in your consumer circulation, from best to hardest. Figuring out an motion’s problem is just like ranking the severity of usability points: As a result of subjectivity is concerned, you want constant standards (on this case, time and psychological and bodily effort) when evaluating the actions towards each other. (When you’ve got the chance, observe customers working with the prototype to assist affirm your rankings.)
Subsequent, assign every motion a shade and some extent worth. I desire purple for essentially the most difficult and grey for the only. The tougher an motion is to finish, the upper its level worth needs to be. Right here’s how I broke down the actions in our consumer circulation instance:
There could also be variable complexity even with the identical exercise. Scrolling will often be a easy process, however what if a consumer is scrolling to learn an advanced authorized doc? In that case, you would create a label that displays the complexity higher, reminiscent of Learn.
In the event you’re working with a crew in particular person, strive placing the screens up on a board and utilizing colourful sticky notes for the motion labels. This can be a enjoyable option to visualize the consumer circulation as a gaggle and see the method from a brand new perspective. For distant collaboration, strive on-line whiteboard instruments like FigJam or Miro.
When you’ve labeled every motion, multiply its assigned worth by the variety of occasions it seems within the circulation. You possibly can then add the factors for every motion collectively to create what I name an “effort whole.” (We’ll speak extra about what this quantity means later after we measure affect.)
Streamline the Consumer Stream
When you’ve calculated a baseline effort whole, return by way of the consumer circulation and determine locations you could possibly mix or simplfy steps. Deal with reducing the variety of actions or changing complicated actions with less complicated ones. For example, you possibly can usually cut back tapping by combining screens. That stated, it’s greatest to not merge screens that include complicated info. For instance, customers might get overwhelmed when you’ve got cost and consumer info fields on the identical display screen. That’s why it’s higher to purpose to lower complexity fairly than deal with lowering the variety of screens.
You too can incorporate automation to ease the consumer’s burden. For example, an app might mechanically fill in a safety code despatched through textual content or detect the consumer’s nation in order that they don’t must sort it.
In our consumer circulation instance, screens two by way of 5 are advertising microcopy and a welcome message. There’s no want to make use of a number of screens for that info, so we are able to mix them. You may additionally make the keyboard mechanically open every time there’s a display screen with an enter discipline so the consumer doesn’t should faucet earlier than typing. Some enter fields could be mixed into one display screen, such because the username and electronic mail deal with. Whereas not relevant in our instance, one other option to make onboarding extra environment friendly is to incorporate superior options, reminiscent of permitting customers to scan cost playing cards as a substitute of typing the credentials.
Decreasing this circulation from 15 screens to seven makes it simpler for the consumer to finish the important process of account setup. Most apps don’t want intensive onboarding processes or explanations. As a substitute, it’s greatest to maintain onboarding transient and targeted on obligatory steps.
Calculate Influence
You might must show to your shopper or different stakeholders that the streamlined consumer circulation you’ve created is price implementing. For instance, the shopper might be hesitant to take away onboarding screens that showcase the app’s many options. In the event you obtain pushback in your proposed modifications, it’s greatest to assist your case with numbers. Spotlight the variety of customers who depart the app earlier than finishing onboarding, or who obtain the app and don’t use it once more. You too can share examples of apps which have extra seamless onboarding flows with the shopper to exhibit the distinction in expertise.
Even additional, with this consumer circulation evaluation methodology you possibly can quantify the affect of the improved circulation. To do that, calculate the whole effort rating of the brand new model, and evaluate it to the unique rating.
Figuring out the hassle scores of each consumer flows, we are able to quantify a change in usability between the 2 variations and use the result to assist our design selections to stakeholders. To take action, merely divide the distinction between the brand new and unique flows (29 factors) by the primary rating (78 factors) and multiply by 100. Within the case of our instance, the brand new onboarding circulation is 37% less complicated than the unique.
I wish to share the modifications with purchasers in a presentation to underscore the affect of the updates and the logic behind eradicating actions or steps. Testing the circulation with a number of customers might help you validate the outcomes of the design course of. If wanted, you possibly can repeat all 4 steps to additional streamline the circulation.
A Extra Environment friendly Product Improvement Course of
After utilizing this methodology, affirm that the circulation equips customers to efficiently navigate the product and obtain their targets by gathering suggestions. As well as, analytics will present the place customers depart the product or fail to finish a process and any modifications within the bounce price because of the updates. With the fintech app I first tried this system on, we decided by way of qualitative testing that customers have been happy with the brand new onboarding course of and didn’t expertise interruptions when the product was up to date.
I’ve discovered that this four-step consumer circulation evaluation method is a fast, efficient manner to enhance UX and maximize effectivity within the product growth course of. Use it to simplify duties for customers and to quantify the affect of your design selections.
