Project Overview & Context
Zighra is a company that specializes in behavioral biometrics and AI-driven solutions to enhance privacy and security in digital interactions. My team at Zighra was focused on building a decentralized content creation platform called Spur to explore this technology and enhance user security and privacy.
During my time at Zighra I was part of the Spur team. Spur is a content creation platform aimed to empower creators by giving them the space to share their content and services, host events, and connect with like-minded individuals to build a community. The platform also has a strong focus on education, with many creators offering services like tutoring and music lessons.
A Long and Confusing Onboarding Journey
Spur's original onboarding flow was severely broken, it was a long and confusing journey. The team initiated a redesign due to these three existing problems within the interface.
Distinct User Categories
New users faced confusion when deciding whether to sign up as a "Creator" or a "Learner." An example of a Creator is a teacher, whereas a Learner represents a student. The distinction between these two account types was not clear to users.
In order to gain insights into the Creator and Learner user categories, we pinpointed the following proto-personas.
Proto-personas developed to understand the Creator and Learner user categories.
Problem Statement
"How might we alleviate the confusion between the two user types throughout the sign-up onboarding process?"
Project Goals
Spur's primary goal in the new user onboarding is to enhance user comprehension during sign-up. To gauge how well this goal is met in the new design, we'll assess the following tasks' success rates.
Understanding the Broken Flow
Current Design
The original onboarding page of Spur is displayed below, highlighting the main friction points that contribute to the broken onboarding flow.
The original onboarding page with its main friction points annotated.
Heat Map of Current Design
Using Hotjar, we tracked the user movement of 212 users in a 5-day experiment. The heat map provided insight into where users were clicking within the current login page and how frequently areas of the page were visited.
This heatmap validated our team's assumption that people were becoming confused between the two distinct user types. Despite having significantly more business/creator users than user/learner users at this stage, the heat map presented conflicting results. The "business/creator" user type had 80% fewer clicks compared to the "user/learner" user type, which raised concerns.
Hotjar heat map tracking 212 users over a 5-day experiment on the current login page.
Current Sign Up & Login Flow
After thorough user testing and research of the user flow, it was found that users are unsure if they are signing up to create and share content or signing up to use and consume the content.
Another key finding within the registration flow was the sign-up process for the Learner user type. In the current design, these Learner users have to enter the login flow to sign up and create an account, which is a completely unexpected and terribly confusing user experience.
The current sign up and login flow, mapping where users get lost.
"The problem lies in users not knowing what they are signing up for, coupled with the challenging navigation in the current sign-up flow"
Competitive Analysis
To identify best practices for the Spur onboarding redesign, a competitive analysis was conducted.
Outcome: A common design pattern I observed was that each company prominently executed a short, quick sign up flow with enough explanation to prevent confusion for the user. I also noticed that most platforms separated the user types from the landing page.
Competitive analysis matrix of onboarding patterns across comparable platforms.
User Survey
Although UX writing was not part of the project's scope, the company wanted to conduct an experiment to explore which phrase would be the most appropriate to replace the overly general term "User". 72% of active users chose the phrase "Learner" over the excessively wide term "User" to represent the customer user type.
Survey results: 72% of active users chose "Learner" to represent the customer user type.
Low-fi Wireframe Iterations
After my team specified the key features that needed to be included on the sign-up page, we developed three distinct design ideas to address the problem space, based on our research findings.
Wireframe 1, with the elements that worked and the ones that didn't.
Wireframe 2, exploring a different structure for user type selection.
Wireframe 3, the direction that informed the final design.
Three Decisions That Fixed the Flow
The three design decisions applied to the new registration interface.
Final Web & Mobile Design
The final web design, with account creation split into its own clear page.
Supporting text, icons, and tooltips give each user type clear context.
Final Mobile Design
The final mobile design of the registration onboarding flow.
Validating the Redesign
A remote, moderated usability study based on tasks was conducted with 8 participants to assess the task success rate disparity between the old and new designs. The percentage of users accomplishing tasks successfully in this study is recorded as the success rate. This binary study illustrates a favorable increase in the Task Success Rate for the new design.
Task success rates in the old design.
Task success rates in the new design.
Learnings & Outcomes
Embracing Ambiguity
The success of the prototyping and user testing phases created great momentum for prioritizing the onboarding redesign for development. But, due to changes in Spur's roadmap, this project was put on the backlog for the development and design team. Nonetheless, this project taught me a lot about embracing ambiguity, asking the right questions, and how to build products for a rapidly expanding user base, all while still delivering impact.