36% boost in user conversion at Flamme
Testimonial
"Her professionalism and adaptability- commendable! She has gracefully handled unexpected shifts in research focus and efforts in conducting usability studies, user interviews, and surveys providing invaluable feedback that has significantly shaped Flamme's development."- Ankit Anyal, CEO Flamme
Due to an NDA, some details are simplified or not included*
Outcome
The What: Problem
Flamme, the interactive dating app for couples, wanted to improve user engagement to beat market trends and overcome conversion challenges
Flamme, the couples' interactive dating startup app, is dedicated to assisting couples in nurturing and strengthening their relationships by providing tools such as date planning, discovery questions, and memory-building features.
Stakeholders saw that app engagement matched market trends and were seeking ways to outperform market. During this review, stakeholders also noticed:
a decrease in conversion rates during onboarding and wanted find the reasons behind this decline
The team was interested in finding out:
factors driving consistent app usage among customers
user expectations from Flamme
user obstacles in relation to conversion
The How: Methods & Process
Identified and understood user engagement, motivations, and conversion roadblocks by creating and analyzing heuristic evaluation, surveys, and moderated in depth user interviews
As one of two UX researchers, we were responsible for:
understanding user motivations, expectations, engagement patterns, roadblocks
So we assessed engagement and experience with methods like:
creating and analyzing surveys
running and analyzing interviews
collaborating with design, marketing, project management, engineering, CEO
providing actionable recommendations
Objective:
The primary goal was to quickly identify usability issues through heuristic analysis and find conversion issues, then gain deeper insights into user motivations, expectations, and engagement patterns through an engagement interviews.
Methodology:
Step 1 - Collaborative Stakeholder Meetings: Crafting the Research Plan
Collaborated with the Project Manager, CEO, Marketing, and Design teams to define research objectives and plan.
As a startup with limited resources and a need for quick turn around we opted to use multiple methods to gather data.
Methods Used:
Heuristic Evaluation: Quick and cost-effective, providing feedback to the team while waiting for user insights.
Severity Scale: Ranging from 0 (no usability problem) to 4 (major usability problem), help feature prioritization.
Survey: Using social media and email campaign for consistent quantitative data on user type, app journey, and valuable features.
survey had a screener to funnel in users who were highly engaged for an optional 30 minute moderated interview
30 min Moderated Virtual Interviews: Going deeper into user experiences, pain points, and values.
Step 2 - Guideline Creation and Survey Setup: Ensuring Clarity
We created discussion guidelines to streamline the survey and email blast flow, setting objectives for the moderated interviews. We used:
MailChimp
Google Survey
Calendly
Zoom/Google Meets
We prioritized questions that gave us the most insight on the most valuable features and onboarding roadblocks.
Step 3 - Facilitating Virtual User Interviews: Gathering Insights
With limited start up funding, we expected our largest roadblock to be recruitment. So we tried different methods to encourage participation:
altruistic push: "share your advice because you care"
gift card raffles
future app discounts
Overall, we collected 30 responses from the survey blast and conducted 10 30-minute moderated interviews.
Step 4 - Analysis and Recommendations: Enhancing Engagement and Conversion
Analyzed and summarized key insights from survey responses and interview data.
Quantitative survey responses: metric and percentage analysis in excel
Qualitative interview data: transcribed and analyzed using virtual whiteboarding via Miro, followed by thematic synthesis
Other deliverables:
Customer Journey Map
User Persona
Presented evidence-based findings, accompanied by recommendations to boost engagement and conversion.
The What Else: Learnings
Enhanced onboarding and user insights prioritizing features yielding 36% app conversion boost
Results
Previous data via MixPanel suggested that a large portion of the conversion drop-off during onboarding was connected to "partner linking".
We reviewed the onboarding steps in our heuristic evaluation and found a few opportunities for rapid improvements with the flow to enhance usability such as:
prioritizing partner linking by changing the order of onboarding (before notifications, instead of after)
making the description of "partner linking" more visible and easier to understand its purpose
We were able to identify the most valuable features in the app based on insights:
We recommended the team to prioritize any pipeline updates and bug fixes focused on these features.
After two weeks of implementing the research recommendations, we saw a 36% boost in user conversion on the app.
Next Steps:
With user research becoming an important piece in our product development, we plan to follow up in future sprints with:
Usability Studies: Using A/B testing to measure the effects of different feature designs
Monetization Studies: Exploring user sentiment toward the app value and cost
Acquisition studies: Understanding how current users are acquired and how to apply that with new users
Lessons:
Stakeholder Perception of Research Methods:
Stakeholders had their own history with research and suggested:
we remove all open-ended questions from the surveys
reduce the number of questions
limit interviews to under 20 minutes
Recognizing the importance of concise yet data-rich research, we created a balance by:
Making all survey open-ended questions optional
Condensing the survey from 18 to 10 questions, using jump logic to help prioritize important questions (ie exploring onboarding flow)
Condensed the original interview time line from 45 minutes to 30 minutes with the option for participants to opt for a follow-up
Recruitment Challenges:
Due to different factors, including limited resources, finding genuine app users was a challenge. It took an additional 2 weeks to recruit enough participants. So we had to think outside the box using strategies like:
Messaging on social media
Engaging connected users (friends, friends of friends etc) who matched with the target audience
We noted the potential of slight bias when analyzing and sharing data from connected users. We recognized that sometimes, some insight is better than no insight.
Creating an "in-house" user research group using tools like UserInterviews