ANY.DO'S ON BOARDING

Circa 2017

Background: With over 40 million users worldwide, Any.do is one of the top productivity tools in the world. I lead the design there between 2016 and 2019.

Considering the short attention span people have today, it’s pretty hard to nail THE perfect on boarding, and definitely not in the first try. It took us a lot of attempts to get the results we wanted, and I believe we can do even better.

WHAT DID WE TRY TO SOLVE?

THE CHALLANGE

Reduce friction coming from users who need to register.

Increase the success rate of users creating an account & reaching the home screen.

Increase retention among users after they reached the home screen.

MY ROLE

End to end design: research, wire-framing, design, prototyping, and usability. Yep, all of it.

Platform: iOS, Android & Web

TL;DR

Creating account rates increased to form 69% to 88% on Android and 71% to 85% on iOS

Reaching home screen rate increased to 86% on Android & 92% on iOS.

Conversion to premium subscription increased by 11%.

Increase in retention on week 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Background: In 2016, when I joined Any.do, the on-boarding wasn’t catastrophic by any means, but it could definitely improve. I started by analyzing the current flow:.

Data showed user churn on all the screens above with the red indicator. Out of the 100% of users who saw the welcome screen, only 71% reached the home screen.

Tackling the registration screen

The first challenge was to increase the percentage of people who register successfully, taking into account that we can’t remove this step, as we need it for syncing data across devices, retargeting churned users and more.

The first iteration saw an increase in user registration overall. With the promise not to post on their behalf, users opted more to connect with Facebook / Google over email, but not significantly, so we quickly moved to another iteration:

Tackling the registration screen

Any.do is an app ruled by a strong emphasis on typography, white spaces and no use of illustration, so convincing stakeholders at bringing in illustration was a challange.

The first illustration tells a story anyone can relate to: forgetting what to buy in the grocery store. It’s followed by a strong yet short promise: We’ll never let you forget a thing, anytime, anywhere.

Following its success, this iteration is still live today. Successful registrations improved significantly. On Android, switching between Facebook and Google led to 75% of the registrations occurring through Google, compared to 56% previously.

Trying to reduce friction

My past experience told me that more screens on the way to your goal increases friction, that’s mostly true. In addition, data showed that users who add a task, dramatically increased their retention on week 1, 2 and 3. That had to be taken into account.

The first iteration tried to reduce the onboarding to just 2 screens: registration, and an encouragement to upgrade (based on previous experiments, that’s where the majority of our users convert to paying customers).

After the user quickly reached the home screen, he could add a task using the FAB.
When he did, tooltips would provide him with an explanation on how to interact with the task (edit, add reminder etc’). Sounds easy and fast right?

Wrong.

Once they reached the home screen, 50% of the users added a task, while the other 50% preferred to explore the app. Some of the explorers returned to add a task, some of them never added a task and quickly churned afterward.

Back to the drawing board

For the potential users of Any.do, a very good onboarding process will involve an outer-app experience for adding a task. This will focus them on a thing they need to accomplish and provide them with suggestions if they don’t have anything in mind.

Following a research which saw high acceptance rates for post onboarding screens like Siri integration (iOS) and missed call feature (Android), we decided to include it in the onboarding phase to get an additional buy-in from the users.

Adding the beneficial feature improved the overall on boarding. 87% approved the integration with Siri on iOS, and 77% approved the Missed Call feature on Android. With the user’s buy in, he was more wiling to cooperate in adding a new task.

Exploring the best way to encourage adding a task

Getting the right flow was the first step, the next one was to explore different variations and learn which one yields the best results in terms of users inserting tasks.

The best way to encourage users to add task wasn’t the prettiest or sleekest, it was aimed at landing them a hand. That’s what the suggestions on the right tried to do, and it did it better than all other versions. It had the affordance of a well known auto-complete screen, combined with icon suggestions that easily helped them insert their first task.

Following the success, this experience was implemented in the web client as well:

FINAL RESULTS