How UX Onboarding can increase the conversion rate for startups
Method: Stakeholder Interview
Client: Aleri
Team: Co-founders, SME, UX designers
Challenge: Exit Rate
Hypothesis: Fact Tags increase the viability
Result: Inconclusive, further research needed
About the Client:
Aleri is a legal tech start-up providing a litigation tool — to create cross-examination questions. The company came into operation in early 2020 and proved its viability with paid 25+ users. For increasing the user base further, the founders — Ian, David, and Jenushikha hired a sales team which was eventually let go as the team was not proving to be of much help.
90% of the traffic was coming from Facebook ads.
They decided to invest the budget of the sales team in the paid Facebook ads. The result was phenomenal — 90% of the traffic coming from Facebook ads. But, there was still a pain …
Marketing and Product misaligned.
The user would come through the Facebook ad via a mobile device and get greeted with a message “Aleri is built and optimized for chrome use on desktop.”
With CSS the device optimization could be fixed.
The prospective user would rarely go back to Desktop to log in to the website to explore the offering. Thus, Aleri was losing a big chunk of prospects. But that's not all they were facing. Next, let’s take a look at how users were not upgrading to a paid version.
Users were not converting after the free trial period
Aleri offers a seven-day free trial to new lawyers to explore, Use, Explore, Experience, and get familiar with the product to generate better Cross-examination questions for their court cases.
Our hypothesis was — Users were not perceiving the value of the product during the seven-day free trial and thus, there are drop-offs.
Aleri was experiencing a major drop out before the end of the trial period.
Let us meet John Doe, our prospective user
John Doe, a 35-year-old sole practitioner who has recently started his own firm. One day in court John loses an assault case. He feels worried about tarnishing his reputation, he turns to Aleri for help yet, during his seven-day trial, he abandons.
So together our team attempted to answer —
How Might we generate Cross-Examination questions for John so feel like a winner and confident?
The first step was to understand John’s user journey. So together the team came up with the following questions:
- How long does John stay on the product during Free trials?
- What stage of John's journey is the last time before he drops out…
- What stage of John's journey is most frequented…
- What stage of John’s journey is least frequented …
- What stage of John’s journey gets the most retention…
- What part of the journey can aid John to upgrade from a free trial
For this project, we decided collectively to focus on giving John to upgrade from the free trial.
50% conversion from Free trial to paid
- Training John on the product so he perceives the value,
- Doing a design audit to identify design improvement, or
- Reducing features — Defining.
We brainstormed the ideas and concluded:
- User Training — Training videos and materials:
Making training videos and available on every step of onboarding. Having done this will help John to use the product efficiently and thus will increase the conversion.
We could not continue to build on that idea as, ‘Training is the opposite of usability.’
- Design Audit — Efficiency and work faster:
Why not Perform a Design audit and identify design issues? Performing a design audit will help in fixing the design bugs. Which in turn, will further improve the experience for John and may lead to an increased conversion rate for Aleri.
We could not continue with this idea as a sole because having feedback from user stories was also important to understand the user behavior. And so, an audit from John’s lens was missing in here.
And to do this what was needed was — Double-blind testing which was out of the scope given the timeline.
- Reduction
Identify the core feature of the product from Aleri’s lens and bring value to John. Then, test if that feature actually brings value to John by conducting a usability test charging a price for those features.
Having done this helps both user and business problems:
As next steps, we brainstormed more on features from a user perspective — which features are key differentiators, which are a must but won’t bring any value, and, more importantly, which are not relevant and are therefore a waste of time and resources.
We concluded the two features that bring in the most value are — Summary Sheet and Fact Tags.
Summary sheet
Fact Tags
Our solution hypothesis was — “How performance gains can increase conversion”.
We then generated prototypes of these two features and recruited 5 Johns for acid testing these features against pricing.
After conducting the usability test, none of the Johns were wanting to upgrade after experiencing the features. They felt these features brought a Neutral satisfaction to them.
Upon further interviewing them after the test, we concluded:
‘One-stop shop’ fallacy — Everything at one place might not give enough value:
Summary Sheet and Fact Tags were good to have features. They were helping John to organize his case facts and information. But, not having them will not hinder Johns's casework as he was able to produce similar results with Microsoft word and Excel.
How Cross-Examination Questions are all that John needs
The value bringing feature, that John was expecting is — Cross-Examination Question itself. All the Johns had similar feedback that they were wanting to see the Cross-examination question generated with the tool to decide if they wanted to pay.
Summary Sheet and Fact tags were the features that were a must, to able John generate cross-examination questions. But stand-alone, they won’t bring any value for him.
So, together as a team, we realized that Summary Sheet and Fact tags were not the MVP and so perhaps testing the Cross-Examination Questions would be our next step.
Lessons learned
Responsive Web Design — Mobile-first design
Having a responsive design helps Reach a bigger audience with the explosive growth in mobile device adoption.
- Features
With real estate limitations, it Forces a focus on content and functionality thus, reducing the extra features. The same real estate limitation helps users reach the MVP faster. Thus, the chances of conversion increase.
- Search engines
Take advantage of Google’s updated algorithm which favors mobile-optimized sites for mobile search results. Thus, increased visibility in search engines.
Training is the opposite of usability — Training should never be a substitute for designing a usable application.
“All complex applications take some time to learn, don’t they? Once we show people the correct way to do things, that will solve all their problems, right?”
People can learn how to use an inefficient application through training and practice, but no matter how well they learn how to cope with its inefficiencies, they will still have to go through inefficient steps every time they perform their tasks.
Training Doesn’t Improve User Satisfaction. Please know, any product that needs a manual to work is broken!
So the question still remains is — “How might we get John to the Cross-examination Questions he needs to win the case?
Recommendations:
- Recruit 5 more John to test Cross-Examination Questions prototypes
- Institute Design OPs
- Continue test and learn
Ruchi Jain is the author of this case study. Have questions? Please leave your comment below -
If you enjoyed this please do give it a clap or get in touch with me if you think I could help you on a project.
