Onboarding: Improving onboarding for new subscribers

TLDR: I led stakeholders through a collaborative solution-finding process to improve the final stage of our onboarding journey, increasing article engagement from the final step by 91%

The problem

Too few subscribers are not engaging much or at all with their subscription early on, leading to higher churn. The business wanted a quick win solution in the onboarding journey to encourage subscribers to start reading immediately, as this is linked to a better retention rate.

Following a design sprint and project scoping, the proposed solution was to replace the final page (You're all set) in onboarding.

This page introduces readers to content in the final step of onboarding but had a low engagement rate. A wireframe had been mocked up and this is where I was brought into the project. I quickly noticed conversations with stakeholders around the design and the content it would contain had become circular. At this point I suggested we make use of existing research we had conducted a few months before with new and lapsed subscribers.

Stakeholder feedback

"How is this different from the homepage?"

"What content would we have on this page?"

"Is it intro to content or is it an intro to your subscription??"

User interviews with new subscribers showed us the needs and pain points new subscribers were currently facing. In summary they tended to not be clear on what their subscription included and didn't know how to find topic-specific content. They also felt overwhelmed and struggled to fit reading The Economist into their lives, which led to low engagement and then cancellation. Here's a rough customer experience map.

Discovery

In the final stage of onboarding we were just presenting subscribers with a screen of content wasn't actually addressing their needs nor helping set them up to get the most of their subscription.

To find get everyone aligned and to find an effective solution in a collaborative way, I ran a content strategy statement workshop with colleagues from marketing, engineers, product, editorial. This gave us an overarching direction. It also allowed the product designer and myself to gently push back on stakeholders who come to us with a request or idea that falls outside of our agreed strategy.

I then guided my colleagues through another collaborative workshop to drill down into the structure of the page and what it would contain. This allowed us to decide on the key focus of the page and how we will encourage a user to commit to reading a piece of content.

Prototyping

The designer and I sketched solutions, which we refined into an initial prototype.

Testing

Our user research team interviewed participants as they interacted with the prototypes. We wanted to know:

What is the page communicating?
What is it driving users to do?
Do they feel guided?
Do they know how to make the most of their subscription?

The results showed that participants:

✅ Understood the page and what was offered

✅ Would help them understand how to make the most of their subscription

✅ Were most interested in podcasts

However they also:

❌ Mistook the topic filters for personalisation

❌ Wanted more than two articles

❌ Kept missing the features at the bottom

Feedback from user testing helped the product designer and I further refine the design and the content (see below). We removed surplus copy and made existing copy tighter, drilling down into the user needs.

The Results: A 91% increase in article clicks

The new design was launched as an AB test against the original. The newly launched version saw a 91% increase in article clicks compared to the original, which aligned with the goal of the project. While increasing article engagement may appear to be a vanity metric at The Economist, increasing engagement is one of many metrics that is correlated with an increase in retention. We're still monitoring the long term effects of this page to see if it has had a meaningful impact on their behaviour. After this project, I help initiate a project that focused on the grouping of content in the masthead, to make content much easier to find.

This onboarding project was one of the first I worked on at The Economist and helped cement a collaborative working relationship with the Senior Product Designer and Product Manager on this project. Additionally after this process, editorial and marketing have been much more keen to block out their calendars and get involved in workshops these workshops because they’ve seen the impact it can have.

In fact, off the back of this project, I was able to initiate a project to help improve an email journey with a member of the marketing team who took part in the workshops.