Designing the New Onboarding Experience

How many times have you chosen not to login in an app because the process was tedious? Well, I have. Many times.

What a lot of apps out there do is that they ask you to fill in a lot of unnecessary information at the login step, thereby making the login process tedious and lengthy. Most of the time they wouldn’t be using all the information that they ask you to fill in.

Truth is — users are scared of lengthy forms and generally more than one Call To Action on any given screen. In fact, in his blog, Neil Patel (one of the well known faces in growth marketing) suggests that having just 3 fields in a form increases the conversion rate by 25%.

Another problem that I see is that these apps tell you to sign up but they don’t tell you why you need to sign up, and that is one of the biggest reasons for users to skip login — no value proposition. Bottom line — you need to show your users what are the benefits of logging in, otherwise there is a high possibility they won’t.

Why did we redesign the onboarding experience?
With our old onboarding process, we were kind of in the same bucket. Our onboarding process has basically 2 parts to it. The first part being the user signing up and the second part, the user linking their phonebook (syncing their contacts).

Initially, the value proposition wasn’t clear enough, CTAs were hidden behind a tap and too much incomprehensible information was there at the user’s disposal. As a result, the skip rate was, well, pretty high.

The reason why we want users to login is because, firstly, a logged in user would earn goCash (our virtual currency) on every booking they make. Secondly, a logged in user gets to see personalised prices, which means what they to see is what they need to pay (taxes, personalised offers and goCash pre-applied).

One of our features — the goCash+ gratification, requires our users to log in and link their phonebook. So, a non logged in user would not get gratified with goCash+ whenever their contact made a new booking. Every time a non logged in user would try to sync their contacts, we would take them to the login screen. That broke the experience.

It was then that we decided to take a step back and make things simpler and clearer for the user.

What did we exactly do?
We made mobile login mandatory using MobileConnect — which makes login possible with just one tap. Yeah, you read that right. What’s happening behind the scenes is that, if you are on mobile data (with any of these network operators — Vodafone, Aircel, Airtel, Idea, Tata Docomo, Telenor), and you are registered with us, you get logged in on that very step. No OTP required! Yes, its that simple (Oh and yes, this led to us getting featured by GSMA at MWC, Barcelona — the biggest conference for mobile tech in the world!). However, if you aren’t on mobile data or you aren’t on the mentioned network operators, you won’t be able to do a one-tap login. Instead, you will asked to login via OTP. Also, there is an option for social login via Facebook. The login flow thus became much simpler.

If you are on mobile data with Vodafone, Aircel, Airtel, Idea, Tata Docomo or Telenor and you are registered with us, you get logged in on that very step. No OTP required! Yes, its that simple.

And in case you’re wondering, we are working on getting more operators on board.

Now let’s talk about the design. The idea was to make the value proposition absolutely clear and easy to comprehend on a 5 inch screen and also to make the login experience super smooth, which meant the number of unnecessary taps had to be removed, and the CTAs had to be right there on the phone’s viewport. So, we revisited the visual design of the onboarding screen. We introduced a carousel (which occupied roughly 30% of the screen). This carousel had bold colours and fonts, and eye catching graphics.

The objective was to allow the user to consume all the information at one glance, so, the communication was also kept short and crisp. The remaining 70% of the screen had the text fields and CTAs.

The impact of this change was huge
- Login skips have been reduced by 35% (which was the primary objective)
- Phonebook syncs have increased by 5x

Haven’t had a taste of this amazing experience yet? Don’t worry, you can try it out right here.

Get Set Goibibo!