After making a revised onboarding stream for a fintech app, my design group had simply three days to check and fine-tune it for our consumer. As a result of we didn’t have sufficient time to collect consumer suggestions, I wanted one other approach to shortly refine the stream and reveal its impression.
I developed an evaluation methodology to streamline the onboarding steps and quantify how a lot less complicated that they had change into. After I offered the up to date stream to the consumer, they authorized our design, and we instantly applied the modifications.
Since then, I’ve used the identical method to strengthen current consumer flows for extra shoppers. It’s a easy methodology that saves time, improves usability, and reveals the effectiveness of your design selections to stakeholders.
Person Movement Evaluation in 4 Steps
Person flows map out the trail a consumer should take to finish a job, equivalent to 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 stream is crucial to UX, and it ought to be used alongside consumer analysis and consumer path analytics. The Interplay Design Basis underscores its significance: “The higher you facilitate the consumer transferring from begin to end on a selected course of—the simpler the product is to work with and the extra probably that you’re to ship an superior consumer expertise.”
Any designer or design group can make use of this four-step stream evaluation to improve UX and assist customers full duties that assist enterprise objectives. 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, equivalent to gestures, face scans, or viewing updates like snackbars. Right here’s the onboarding stream instance labeled with every step the consumer takes. On this case, the stream makes use of 5 actions: wait, scroll, faucet, kind, and observe an exterior hyperlink. Whether or not you create a digital consumer stream or a bodily one with boards and sticky notes, it’s useful to position the motion labels close to the associated screens (or display representations) to visualise the steps.
This instance stream 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 kind than to faucet. To judge the consumer stream, we want a approach to quantify every motion.
Rank Actions by Complexity
The subsequent step is to contemplate 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. Alternatively, typing takes bodily effort (significantly on cellular). Different actions might solely take psychological effort with no bodily motion, equivalent to ready for a snackbar to vanish. The mixed psychological and bodily effort that customers should take to achieve their objectives is the interplay value.
I like to recommend growing a easy hierarchy for the actions in your consumer stream, from best to hardest. Figuring out an motion’s issue is much like score 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. (You probably have the chance, observe customers working with the prototype to assist affirm your rankings.)
Subsequent, assign every motion a shade and some extent worth. I choose crimson for essentially the most difficult and grey for the best. The harder an motion is to finish, the upper its level worth ought to be. Right here’s how I broke down the actions in our consumer stream instance:
There could also be variable complexity even with the identical exercise. Scrolling will normally be a easy job, however what if a consumer is scrolling to learn a sophisticated authorized doc? In that case, you can create a label that displays the complexity higher, equivalent to Learn.
In the event you’re working with a group in particular person, attempt placing the screens up on a board and utilizing colourful sticky notes for the motion labels. This can be a enjoyable approach to visualize the consumer stream as a bunch and see the method from a brand new perspective. For distant collaboration, attempt on-line whiteboard instruments like FigJam or Miro.
When you’ve labeled every motion, multiply its assigned worth by the variety of instances it seems within the stream. You’ll be able to then add the factors for every motion collectively to create what I name an “effort complete.” (We’ll speak extra about what this quantity means later once we measure impression.)
Streamline the Person Movement
When you’ve calculated a baseline effort complete, return by the consumer stream and determine locations you might be able to mix or simplfy steps. Concentrate on lowering the variety of actions or changing complicated actions with less complicated ones. As an illustration, you’ll be able to usually cut back tapping by combining screens. That stated, it’s greatest to not merge screens that comprise complicated info. For instance, customers might get overwhelmed when you’ve got cost and consumer info fields on the identical display. That’s why it’s higher to goal to lower complexity relatively than give attention to decreasing the variety of screens.
You too can incorporate automation to ease the consumer’s burden. As an illustration, an app may routinely fill in a safety code despatched by way of textual content or detect the consumer’s nation so that they don’t have to kind it.
In our consumer stream instance, screens two by 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 can additionally make the keyboard routinely open every time there’s a display with an enter area so the consumer doesn’t should faucet earlier than typing. Some enter fields might be mixed into one display, such because the username and electronic mail tackle. Whereas not relevant in our instance, one other approach to make onboarding extra environment friendly is to incorporate superior options, equivalent to permitting customers to scan cost playing cards as an alternative of typing the credentials.
Lowering this stream from 15 screens to seven makes it simpler for the consumer to finish the important job of account setup. Most apps don’t want intensive onboarding processes or explanations. As an alternative, it’s greatest to maintain onboarding transient and targeted on essential steps.
Calculate Impression
You might have to show to your consumer or different stakeholders that the streamlined consumer stream you’ve created is price implementing. For instance, the consumer 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 go away 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 consumer to reveal the distinction in expertise.
Even additional, with this consumer stream evaluation methodology you’ll be able to quantify the impression of the improved stream. To do that, calculate the full effort rating of the brand new model, and examine it to the unique rating.
Understanding the trouble 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 authentic flows (29 factors) by the primary rating (78 factors) and multiply by 100. Within the case of our instance, the brand new onboarding stream is 37% less complicated than the unique.
I prefer to share the modifications with shoppers in a presentation to underscore the impression of the updates and the logic behind eradicating actions or steps. Testing the stream with a couple of customers may also help you validate the outcomes of the design course of. If wanted, you’ll be able to repeat all 4 steps to additional streamline the stream.
A Extra Environment friendly Product Improvement Course of
After utilizing this methodology, affirm that the stream equips customers to efficiently navigate the product and obtain their objectives by gathering suggestions. As well as, analytics will present the place customers go away the product or fail to finish a job and any modifications within the bounce charge because of the updates. With the fintech app I first tried this method on, we decided by qualitative testing that customers had been glad 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 stream evaluation method is a fast, efficient method to enhance UX and maximize effectivity within the product growth course of. Use it to simplify duties for customers and to quantify the impression of your design selections.