bunq
Background & context
Onboarding users to a bank is never a straightforward experience, be it physical or online.
At bunq, having always tried to "make life easy", this may have been another tradeoff that requires rethinking the signup experience through a specific customer persona.
My role
My role was being the product designer in the project, led by our Head of Data, Research, & Analytics and in collaboration with two software engineers and one product owner and two researchers.
Process
With a specific-outcome driven project, this was my process:
Problem Statement
After focusing on making the signup easy, user conversion is dropping drastically over 3 months compared to the previous 3 months (even though task success rate improved considerably).
What is app stickiness?
A sticky app holds a loyal audience, low churn, and high engagement when it delivers a great and unique user experience that sets it apart from the competition. Stickiness is all about users finding your app valuable and relevant to their lives.
Research and Insights
Across the whole company, we developed a user persona with a set of demographics, behaviors, and pain points (the details are confidential).
These users express a need for the bunq app and feel empowered in dealing with their finances through it.
Average time from current step for first app open to completing signup is significantly higher month on month, and easy setup duration increased considerably over the past 15 months.
Conversion between App first open → First invoice paid
Exploration and design concept
We are conducted the following multivariate tests:
Why did we choose these interactions? These interactions were related to the lowest conversion rates (weakest links) in the signup flows.
Testing & Feedback
To make the design decisions, the results pointed to altering the following interactions/screens:
Make an impression in the 1st 10 seconds
Help users pick their journey with purpose
Provide a thorough and adequate proposition to all users
We use the first month to prove the value of bunq (cards, sub-accounts)
We chose our hypotheses based on a combination of qualitative testing (in-depth interviews), usability testing, and heuristics.
Let's take the example of the plan choice flow: We ran usability testing for different variations of the signup process. We noticed that the user is dropping off during the onboarding process due to overwhelm and confusion.
We have run an A/B/C test with the current variants:
Variant A was the most converting (with 95% confidence), however gave the lesser amount of details. Variant B, though information-heavy, lead to users to feel less confident because the need to read more about the plans before choosing.
There are discrepancies in what users say and what they do, especially when choosing a plan, they like comparing, but the process is not necessarily clear or simple.
Challenges and tradeoffs
We have run an A/B/C test with the current variants:
Solution
We filled the gaps in the user onboarding by pushing the following updates:
The first impression of the app should be a convincing pitch, focusing on the value proposition, but at the same time, enticing enough to start exploring.
Users are given a purpose-based "deal" consideration where they choose what value they suits their needs.
We walk users through what type of account they can get with bunq, by including a comparison experience.
We increased re-verification conversion from 29% to 44% by simply preparing users for the video verification phase, as well as providing a consideration (help, verification explanation) for possible frustrations with repeated experiences.
Giving tutorials to the prompt actions highly correlated with retention, increased long-term conversion of our paying customers.
Impact
Following a rule of lowest possible number of interactions per screen.
This metric is the activity driver of the app, hence resulting in more retention.
By reducing journey errors, we increased the mean time to failure. This resulted in less churn rates.
Learnings
I led the design of the signup/onboarding experience for bunq to improve the conversion rate between several key steps.
Onboarding users to a bank is never a straightforward experience, be it physical or online. At bunq, having always tried to "make life easy", this may have been another tradeoff that requires rethinking the signup experience through a specific customer persona.
My role was being the product designer in the project, led by our Head of Data, Research, & Analytics and in collaboration with two software engineers and one product owner and two researchers.
After focusing on making the signup easy, user conversion is dropping drastically over 3 months compared to the previous 3 months (even though task success rate improved considerably).
Average time from current step for first app open to completing signup is significantly higher month on month, and easy setup duration increased considerably over the past 15 months.
After asking 10 users why would they drop-off during signup; 7 out of 10 mentioned that do not seeclear features when choosing a plan:
Conversion between App first open → First invoice paid
We are conducted the following multivariate tests:
First 5 seconds
Selecting a Plan
Selecting a type of account (Personal, Business, Joint)
Why did we choose these interactions? These interactions were related to the lowest conversion rates (weakest links) in the signup flows.
To make the design decisions, the results pointed to altering the following interactions/screens:
Make an impression in the 1st 10 seconds
Help users pick their journey with purpose
Provide a thorough and adequate proposition to all users
We use the first month to prove the value of bunq (cards, sub-accounts)
We chose our hypotheses based on a combination of qualitative testing (in-depth interviews), usability testing, and heuristics.
Let's take the example of the plan choice flow: We ran usability testing for different variations of the signup process. We noticed that the user is dropping off during the onboarding process due to overwhelm and confusion.
We have run an A/B/C test with the current variants:
Variant A was the most converting (with 95% confidence), however gave the lesser amount of details. Variant B, though information-heavy, lead to users to feel less confident because the need to read more about the plans before choosing.
There are discrepancies in what users say and what they do, especially when choosing a plan, they like comparing, but the process is not necessarily clear or simple.
We filled the gaps in the user onboarding by pushing the following updates:
The first impression of the app should be a convincing pitch, focusing on the value proposition, but at the same time, enticing enough to start exploring.
Users are given a purpose-based "deal" consideration where they choose what value they suits their needs.
We walk users through what type of account they can get with bunq, by including a comparison experience.
We increased re-verification conversion from 29% to 44% by simply preparing users for the video verification phase, as well as providing a consideration (help, verification explanation) for possible frustrations with repeated experiences.
Giving tutorials to the prompt actions highly correlated with retention, increased long-term conversion of our paying customers.
Following a rule of lowest possible number of interactions per screen.
This metric is the activity driver of the app, hence resulting in more retention.
By reducing journey errors, we increased the mean time to failure. This resulted in less churn rates.
