Onboarding

Role:
User Experience Designer and Video Editor

1. Project Goals
• User Goals:
• Enable users to personalise recommendations by selecting favourite shows during onboarding, providing relevant content from the start.
• Create a seamless setup process, minimising steps to encourage engagement without overwhelming new users.
• Business Goals:
• Boost engagement and retention by aligning recommendations with user preferences from day one.
• Improve user satisfaction by making content selection intuitive and approachable, encouraging long-term usage.
2. Research and Define
• User Research: Conducted usability tests to assess onboarding expectations and interest in content customisation. Findings revealed that users favoured a quick, simple onboarding and were familiar with only a few shows, preferring a selection of 3-5 shows out of a 20-30 list for recommendations.
• Research Insight: Users preferred a streamlined journey, and testing confirmed that users recognised only a limited number of shows in larger lists. This supported the need for a concise selection, ensuring relevance without choice overload.
• Competitive Analysis: Analysed onboarding flows from similar streaming platforms, focusing on balancing personalisation with efficiency.
• Insights: Users valued a clear, visually engaging way to pick favourite shows quickly. High-quality thumbnails helped ensure faster, easier selection.
3. Ideate and Prioritise Solutions
• Challenges: The onboarding flow initially included five steps—Account Details, Price Plan, Payment, Profile Setup, and Content Selection. Additionally, the image assets had inconsistent aspect ratios, complicating the display for the content selection grid.
• Concept Development: Explored layouts to simplify the show selection experience, focusing on grid-based designs with consistent thumbnails.
• Solution: Separated the onboarding into two distinct flows: Steps 1-3 as an account creation journey, and Steps 4-5 as a welcome journey. After discussing research findings, the Data team confirmed that 3 shows were sufficient for recommendation accuracy. The Content team recommended refreshing show options monthly, simplifying content selection.
4. Prototyping
• Prototype Creation: Developed high-fidelity mockups to demonstrate the revised onboarding flow and show selection. Used hover states and selection highlights to improve interaction clarity for web platforms.
5. User Testing and Feedback
• Testing Sessions: Tested the new onboarding flow, collecting feedback on the ease and speed of account creation and content selection. Tracked user satisfaction, time to completion, and selection engagement.
• Key Findings: Users appreciated the reduced steps for account creation, feeling the welcome journey was more enjoyable than obligatory. Feedback indicated that a “Select at least 3” prompt was helpful without feeling restrictive.
6. Refinement and Iteration
• Refinements: Limited show options to align with users’ familiarity, refreshing monthly to maintain engagement. The show selection grid was refined for visual consistency across different aspect ratios.
• Usability Enhancements: Enhanced the layout for visual uniformity, added a tooltip prompt for minimum selections, and optimised navigation across all devices.
7. Implementation
• Development Collaboration: Worked closely with developers to integrate the new onboarding flow and ensure the recommendation engine utilised selected shows effectively.
• Launch Strategy: Rolled out incrementally, with analytics to track completion rates and early engagement metrics.

Results: Users responded positively to a streamlined three-step account creation. Separating the welcome journey made it feel less like an additional task. The simplified content selection also allowed easy maintenance with a monthly update to just 20 shows, enhancing both efficiency and user satisfaction.