Enhance the Product Growth Course of With Consumer Stream Evaluation
After making a revised onboarding circulate for a fintech app, my design crew had simply three days to check and fine-tune it for our shopper. As a result of we didn’t have sufficient time to collect consumer suggestions, I wanted one other technique to rapidly refine the circulate and reveal its impression.
I developed an evaluation technique to streamline the onboarding steps and quantify how a lot easier that they had develop into. After I offered the up to date circulate to the shopper, they accepted our design, and we instantly carried out the modifications.
Since then, I’ve used the identical method to strengthen present consumer flows for extra shoppers. It’s a easy technique that saves time, improves usability, and exhibits the effectiveness of your design choices to stakeholders.
Consumer Stream Evaluation in 4 Steps
Consumer flows map out the trail a consumer should take to finish a job, reminiscent of onboarding, subscribing, and checkout. Designers could make consumer flows in the course of the product improvement course of or as a part of common UX evaluation after a product has launched (particularly when updates and new options are carried out).
A product’s consumer circulate is vital to UX, and it needs to be used alongside consumer analysis and user path analytics. The Interplay Design Basis underscores its significance: “The higher you facilitate the consumer shifting from begin to end on a selected course of—the simpler the product is to work with and the extra possible that you’re to ship an superior consumer expertise.”
Any designer or design crew can make use of this four-step circulate evaluation to reinforce UX and assist customers full duties that assist enterprise targets. As an instance, I’ll apply the method to an app onboarding instance.
Map the Present Course of
Step one is to look at the consumer path by noting every motion required to finish the duty, reminiscent of gestures, face scans, or viewing updates like snackbars. Right here’s the onboarding circulate instance labeled with every step the consumer takes. On this case, the circulate makes use of 5 actions: wait, scroll, faucet, kind, and observe an exterior hyperlink. Whether or not you create a digital consumer circulate or a bodily one with boards and sticky notes, it’s useful to position the motion labels close to the associated screens (or display representations) to visualise the steps.
This instance circulate entails many steps throughout a number of screens, and it’s clear that it must be streamlined. However the variety of actions isn’t the one measure of how demanding a course of is for the consumer. Some steps are extra taxing than others. For instance, it takes extra bodily effort to kind than to faucet. To guage the consumer circulate, we’d like a technique to quantify every motion.
Rank Actions by Complexity
The subsequent step is to think about the time and psychological or bodily effort every step requires. For instance, deciding between two choices demands mental energy, even for seemingly small choices. However, typing takes physical effort (notably on cell). Different actions could solely take psychological effort with no bodily motion, reminiscent of ready for a snackbar to vanish. The mixed psychological and bodily effort that customers should take to succeed in their targets is the interaction cost.
I like to recommend creating a easy hierarchy for the actions in your consumer circulate, from best to hardest. Figuring out an motion’s problem is much like rating the severity of usability issues: As a result of subjectivity is concerned, you want constant standards (on this case, time and psychological and bodily effort) when evaluating the actions in opposition to each other. (If in case you have the chance, observe customers working with the prototype to assist verify your rankings.)
Subsequent, assign every motion a coloration and some extent worth. I desire crimson for probably the most difficult and grey for the only. The harder an motion is to finish, the upper its level worth needs to be. Right here’s how I broke down the actions in our consumer circulate instance:
There could also be variable complexity even with the identical exercise. Scrolling will often be a easy job, however what if a consumer is scrolling to learn a sophisticated authorized doc? In that case, you might create a label that displays the complexity higher, reminiscent of Learn.
When you’re working with a crew in individual, strive placing the screens up on a board and utilizing colourful sticky notes for the motion labels. This can be a enjoyable technique to visualize the consumer circulate as a bunch and see the method from a brand new perspective. For distant collaboration, strive on-line whiteboard instruments like FigJam or Miro.
When you’ve labeled every motion, multiply its assigned worth by the variety of occasions it seems within the circulate. You possibly can then add the factors for every motion collectively to create what I name an “effort whole.” (We’ll speak extra about what this quantity means later once we measure impression.)
Streamline the Consumer Stream
When you’ve calculated a baseline effort whole, return by way of the consumer circulate and establish locations you might be able to mix or simplfy steps. Give attention to lowering the variety of actions or changing advanced actions with easier ones. For example, you possibly can usually cut back tapping by combining screens. That stated, it’s finest to not merge screens that comprise advanced data. For instance, customers could get overwhelmed when you have cost and consumer data fields on the identical display. That’s why it’s higher to intention to lower complexity moderately than deal with decreasing the variety of screens.
You can too incorporate automation to ease the consumer’s burden. For example, an app may robotically fill in a safety code despatched through textual content or detect the consumer’s nation so that they don’t must kind it.
In our consumer circulate instance, screens two by way of 5 are advertising microcopy and a welcome message. There’s no want to make use of a number of screens for that data, so we will mix them. You could possibly additionally make the keyboard robotically open each time there’s a display with an enter discipline so the consumer doesn’t should faucet earlier than typing. Some enter fields will be mixed into one display, such because the username and e-mail tackle. Whereas not relevant in our instance, one other technique to make onboarding extra environment friendly is to incorporate superior options, reminiscent of permitting customers to scan cost playing cards as an alternative of typing the credentials.
Decreasing this circulate from 15 screens to seven makes it simpler for the consumer to finish the important job of account setup. Most apps don’t need extensive onboarding processes or explanations. As an alternative, it’s finest to maintain onboarding temporary and targeted on vital steps.
Calculate Affect
You could must show to your shopper or different stakeholders that the streamlined consumer circulate you’ve created is price implementing. For instance, the shopper could possibly be hesitant to take away onboarding screens that showcase the app’s many options. When you obtain pushback in your proposed modifications, it’s finest to assist your case with numbers. Spotlight the variety of customers who go away the app earlier than finishing onboarding, or who obtain the app and don’t use it once more. You can too share examples of apps which have extra seamless onboarding flows with the shopper to reveal the distinction in expertise.
Even additional, with this consumer circulate evaluation technique you possibly can quantify the impression of the improved circulate. To do that, calculate the overall effort rating of the brand new model, and evaluate it to the unique rating.
Realizing the trouble scores of each consumer flows, we will quantify a change in usability between the 2 variations and use the end result to assist our design choices to stakeholders. To take action, merely divide the distinction between the brand new and unique flows (29 factors) by the primary rating (78 factors) and multiply by 100. Within the case of our instance, the brand new onboarding circulate is 37% easier than the unique.
I prefer to share the modifications with shoppers in a presentation to underscore the impression of the updates and the logic behind eradicating actions or steps. Testing the circulate with a couple of customers will help you validate the outcomes of the design course of. If wanted, you possibly can repeat all 4 steps to additional streamline the circulate.
A Extra Environment friendly Product Growth Course of
After utilizing this technique, verify that the circulate equips customers to efficiently navigate the product and obtain their targets by gathering suggestions. As well as, analytics will present the place customers go away the product or fail to finish a job and any modifications within the bounce fee because of the updates. With the fintech app I first tried this method on, we decided by way of qualitative testing that customers had been happy with the brand new onboarding course of and didn’t expertise interruptions when the product was up to date.
I’ve discovered that this four-step consumer circulate evaluation method is a fast, efficient approach to enhance UX and maximize effectivity within the product improvement course of. Use it to simplify duties for customers and to quantify the impression of your design choices.