Marco Polo Learning inspires children, age 3 to 7, to become explorers and lifelong learners.
The primary purpose of their app is to make early education an adventure, filled with the thrill and joy of discovery for all kids.
It was made possible through educational, child-tailored videos, games and puzzles. Their award-winning MVP, released to the market in 2018, gathered over a million users, mostly from the USA and China.
I joined the project as a Lead Product Designer. My goal was to improve an onboarding of the new user, that would enhance engagement and gamification in the app.
I worked alongside Product and Marketing Teams (Product Owner, Product Manager, UI Developer, UI Designer and 3D Artist, Growth Marketers, Analysts, Researchers). A half of the team worked remotely.
I was challenged to find solutions and improvements to the onboarding flow:
As a UX design process, I followed a design thinking approach, reflecting 5 steps: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.
As a lead, to help kick-off this project, I organised and facilitated a couple of creative workshops across the entire product & marketing teams. I tried to understand any technical limitations and decisions behind the current onboarding flow before suggesting changes. Surprisingly, the real challenge lay in the regulations of US law.
During the analysis, we had access to nearly 1mln user accounts and their data. Based on quantitative research, we identified a variety of inconsistencies and pain points.
The onboarding journey required a user to learn inconsistent patterns. Instead of a happy and satisfying experience, the customer was often frustrated; in most cases, users couldn’t finish the process without tech support.
Based on gathered information and analysed data, we identified user personas, agreed on some principles and then brainstormed an optimal onboarding. As a team, we voted on the best ideas and then I presented our key themes back to stakeholders.
We championed the consistent interaction model to help the user understand and smoothly navigate the process, and avoid rediscovering new patterns on every page.
I wanted the team to consider the difference between being product-centric (feature-led) and customer-centric (service-led).
The proposition was to:
The next phase was to prototype the new journey and test it with real users.
I prototyped the whole end-to-end onboarding in Flinto, and we tested it with five different users. After three rounds of iterations, we were ready to send it to development.
I wasn’t involved in the development and final test phase. After my role was accomplished, I handed over all the files to the dev and product team.
Persuade stakeholders to a new approach and to change the current flow, implement gamification and engage a new user more effectively from the very first moment.
My ambition, as a leader, was to help empower product, marketing and dev teams to collaborate more effectively, with equal value contribution to the process, to avoid a ‘pass the baton’ approach, and to thus improve end-user experience.
The most significant obstacles were an inefficient decision process caused by long-distance communication in different time zones and inaccessible stakeholders. This greatly extended the process.
Making the painful and long journey a bit quirky and fun can soften long user experience.