Amanotes — #1 app’s publisher in the Southeast Asia
Optimize the onboarding experience to reduce the drop-out rate by 20%.
Amanotes is a tech start-up based in Vietnam that publishes musical games for users all over the world. Its famous well-known game is Music Tiles, which reached millions of downloads in 2021.
During my time here, I worked with the Pianify team whose mission was to teach Piano to young adults through their favorite songs rather than traditional music theory. I collaborated with a product manager to optimize our onboarding flow with an expectation to reduce the drop-out rate.
Location
May 21 — Aug 21
Time
Team
Vietnam
Product Manager
Learning Content Designer
Developers
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Affinity Diagramming
Wireframing
Prototyping
Skills
BACKGROUND
Most of the users dropped out during onboarding.
PIANOTE is an app that teaches adults to play Piano through their favorite songs rather than traditional music theory. Our data showed that the onboarding was long and complicated for users to complete, and they often dropped out before reaching the app's core content.
“How might we increase first-time user engagement through onboarding?”
“How might we create a funny & easy onboarding for new users to complete?”
IMPACT
Measure our success
After the first week of launching, we started to see improvements in user experience on 60 users going through our onboarding flow:
-30%
-20%
+50
30% decrease in the total interaction cost compared to the original flow.
Decrease in the total interaction cost compared to the original flow.
20% reduction in drop-out rate
In August 2021, the onboarding flow will be launched for the mass users. In the first week, we didn’t record any issues related to onboarding. Overall, we saw there are 20% reduction in drop-out rate.
Increase in first-time user engagement.
The onboarding completion rate increased by 50%. First-time users spent 5-6' exploring the app instead of 2'.
PROCESS
UX Process in the start-up
To get started, I led a meeting with stakeholders going through concerns in the Product Backlog. Then, I conducted usability tests to understand the user's pain points. After having all the information, I began ideation and iterated on 2 rounds of design before the final delivery.
Following the Scrum framework, the process from concept to design hand-off spreads over 4 consecutive sprints:
DISCOVERY
Exploring user’s issues with usability testings
Because our target users are in the USA and Canada, I decided to launch an unmoderated usability test with 8 participants on the UserTesting platform to recruit correct target users who are in different countries from us.
Usability testing
01. The survey questions don’t reflect the learners’ experience
Motivations and goals questions were vague as users did not think too seriously about their plan to learn Piano.
Answers are detailed, requiring users to read and understand its context to select.
02. Users do not understand whether they need a piano to learn with the app.
Users who don't currently have a Piano were informed about the benefits of our app instead of saying directly that users needs a Piano to learn with us.
03. The flow of placement tests is illogically organized
For users who do not have experience in Piano, they also had to go through a placement test of 1 question "Do you have experience playing Piano?"
Insight
DISCOVERY
After presenting the user's problems, the team defined the next steps to break those user's issues into user stories to manage in an agile environment.
Understanding the business requirements of each onboarding element
After clustering our user stories into 3 onboarding elements, I started examining the logic of the current flow. Then, I led a meeting with my stakeholders including Product Owner, Product Manager, and Instructional Designer to gather business requirements.
Breaking feedbacks into users stories
DEFINE
Identify design goals with “How Might We…” questions
Based on both business requirements and usability issues, we started our ideation by asking "How might we.." questions to identify our design goals for a better onboarding.
How might we keep onboarding quick and easy for users while ensuring that our business collects enough data for personalization?
How might we help users understand our app's concept or at least that they need a Piano to learn with this current version?
How might we know the user's level in the quickest and easiest way?
Ideas for improvements starts with competitive analysis
To find my answers, I did a competitive analysis of the onboarding from our 3 competitors and found that content provided on onboarding is directly meaningful to the learning journey of users. In details:
IDEATION
Translate design goals into high-level solutions
Kept in mind the design goals, I quickly visualized multiple solutions to validate the idea with my stakeholders and finally delivered 3 high-level solutions in the form of user flows. After 2 rounds of design evaluations, we narrowed down our focus to 4 main improvements:
01. Informative introduction
Users need to understand that they need a Piano or Keyboard to learn with our app. They can start learning their favorite songs right after opening the app.
02. Meaningful user survey
Information collected from the survey was used to customize the learning experience. Selected questions should have strong impacts on the learning path of users.
03. Quick and easy way to test user’s levels
A placement test is replaced by questions to categorize users' levels at the beginning. Users with no previous experience in Piano don’t need to go through the whole placement test.
WIREFRAME
Transform sketches into user flow
After seeing other solutions from competitors, we led a meeting with our stakeholders to present our findings. We found that in our company, solutions related to this problem were being ideated in many ways. However, no one had a mutual goal in tackling this problem. My role was to summarize the solutions and which stages they were at.
Hi-fidelity screens
After gathering all information from a lot of stakeholders, our team has an overview of how this problem is being tackled across an organization.
However, our team is Consider-Buy, we prioritized related projects and decided to work further on deploying the product finder tool because solutions are ideated but not tested yet.
DELIVERY
Finalizing improvements made on the UIs for the prototype
I collaborated with my product manager to review our wireframes and some improvements we made on the UIs. Then, we came up with features to optimize the onboarding experience.
01. Clearly informed users that we don’t support built-in keyboard
Previously, users don't know whether they need a Piano to learn with our app. If users don't have a piano, saying that our app currently does not support a built-in keyboard will help users understand the app's concept.
02. Shorten the flow by only asking questions that are relevant to learning path of users
Previously, we asked users 5 questions. During the survey, we decided to ask 3 questions which helped us customize the song library.
03. Minimize interaction cost
Previously, users needed to ensure their choice by tapping 2 times on survey questions. Removing the "Next" button for one option question. Users need 1 tap to continue onboarding
LESSONS
Moving forward with lessons
Working in an agile environment, I learned how to communicate with stakeholders actively. I often ran discussions with stakeholders to clarify the ticket's context or validate to directions. Active communication helps my tasks flow more easily and ensures the team has a mutual understanding of my contribution towards sprint's goals.
01. Active Communication
02. Product Vision — Seeing a problem with different perspectives
Thanks to continuous feedback from my internal team, I could look at the problems from various angles. Looking further and closer like this enables me to explore a wider range of solutions rather than arriving too soon at detailed solutions.