Rocketbook - Onboarding
Help users understand how to use the app by taking a guided, hands-on approach to address their needs.
Overview
The Rocketbook mobile app is a way for users to take notes, scan, and blast their notes to their favorite cloud platform, such as, Google Drive or Evernote. Missions is a redesigned onboarding experience, which guides the user's first few scanning sessions.
The Problem
Before introducing Missions, the only type of onboarding users got were occasionally tool tips that popped up on certain parts of the app. However, we quickly realized our users were not familiar with apps like Rocketbook's, which resulted in many of our users being confused on how to use it. For example, the main purpose of our app is to scan Rocketbook's notebooks but our users did not know how to scan their notebooks with our app. These types of problems led to almost 80% of our users never coming back to us within their first month of downloading the app.​
Brainstorming
Our main goal with redesigning our onboarding experience was to increase activation.
Before diving into possible solutions, we recognized that many apps do not have a formal guided onboarding system. In fact, in the UX world, people will say "If you have to guide a user how to use the app, the app is already a bad experience".
However, unlike some apps that have a clear audience in age or demographics (i.e. Instagrams' main audience are users between the ages of 18-29), our app is for the mass audience, which means people of all ages and backgrounds are our audience. We had to think about a few ways to address all of our users and at the end of multiple brainstorming sessions, we collectively decided that a guided onboarding method is what our users needed. This is how Missions came into our app.
We discussed the most important features and actions we wanted our users to take in the app, such as, sending a scan or connecting your cloud account to the app. Once I scoped this out, we made sure the most important features/tasks were the first Missions our users encountered.
A/B Testing
While we were confident that a guided onboarding experience, would increase activation and decrease the amount of complaints from our users, we needed proof that Missions is a better and more valuable option for our users.
However, because we are a startup company with limited time, resources, and manpower, doing user interviews and usability testing were out of scope. Instead, we decided to do an A/B test.
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Group A got the normal tool tip onboarding experience.
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Group B got the Mission style onboarding experience.
Design
Typically before landing on a design solution, I make sure to have multiple options to run by my Product Manager providing context to the pros and cons of each option. Below is the design we landed on.
The Outcome
We ran the A/B testing for about 4 weeks and discovered that Missions was highly successful. We saw a decrease in complaints and confusion emails our Customer Happiness team received and we felt confident in the idea of saying goodbye to tool tips and hello to Missions. We spent several weeks creating and crafting new Missions as well as gamifying the process.
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A quick disclaimer - During my time at Rocketbook, I was working on many different projects and we were essentially pushing our new things every 2 weeks. So it's difficult to know is Missions is the sole reason why our activation increased. However during my 10 months at Rocketbook, we saw a 11% user activation increase and even got requests from our users to make more Missions that teaches them about the app.
Reflections
In the UX world, guided onboarding styles are typically frowned upon due to its stigma that "if you have to teach someone to use the app, then that's bad UX". However, after joining this company, what I learned and impacted me the most is every user audience is different and we, the company, know our users best. Sure - maybe for a different app, a guided onboarding experience wouldn't be ideal. But for our users, we knew they needed a more hands-on experience and we had to throw out this stigma and listen to what we felt our users needed.
As a UX Designer, it's really easy to get caught up in trends, to monitor what everyone else is doing, or make sure to do what top companies are doing. Creating 'Missions' was a humbling experience. Before following trends or doing what other UX professionals are telling you to do, you must understand your users, acknowledge their unique struggles, and meet them where they are.
For us, that was introducing Missions - the 'if-you-need-to-guide-them-that's-bad-UX' method.