A growth design trick: leveraging ah-ha moment
Flip the onboarding experience.
Bank connection is a huge friction point. I flip the order of the onboarding experience by giving users the ah-ha moment before the bank connection. Did users get motivated by seeing ah-ha moment early? Let’s see how it goes.
My role: strategy partner, designer
Stakeholders: Risk, legal, Infra team.
Background: What does Earnin do?
Earnin: Cash out your paycheck early
Earnin is an app that lets you draw small amounts of your earned wages before payday.
Activation: Cash out within 7 days.
But we have a long onboarding flow before cash out.
Since Earnin’s funnel is overly long, and cash out is right after onboarding. Hence we are going to improve activation by increasing conversion in the onboarding flow.
Earnin Funnel
Sign up step conversion
sign up steps conversion mapping by step. The exact number is not shown here due to NDA. According to the data, the biggest opportunity we can have is the “connected bank” step at this stage.
Growth Design: Business metrics
What are the metrics we are targeting on the bank connection step?
The overall conversion rate: 58%
Growth Design: Business metrics
What are the granular metrics we are targeting here?
Growth Design: Problem definition
What problems do users have with connecting bank?
We got some insights from qualitative user research:
Growth Design: Problem definition
How might we get the distribution of the drop-off cause?
Growth Design: Problem definition
We launched a couple of surveys and analyzed existing data.
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
How might we solve those user problems to get a higher conversion?
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
Which hypothesis should we test?
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
How might we get users motivated to find their bank credentials?
Hypothesis: If we give users some motivation, they will try harder to find their bank credentials to connect their bank and the conversion rate will increase.
Through user research, we found that there are 2 kinds of motivation that could potentially drive users.
Motivation 1
Motivation 2
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
Motivation 1: How might we motivate users by showing benefits?
– Invalidated
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
Motivation 2: What could be the possible ways for cashing out when we haven’t approved users’ eligibility yet?
Earnin’s business model requires bank connection, GPS, .etc to approve users’ eligibility to cash out. So in order to allow users to cash out at this point, it will be a different experience from normal cash out users have.
Growth Design: Hypothesis ideation
Motivation 2: which alternative should we go about?
Growth Design: Design decisions
Motivation 2: How might we motivate users by cashing out before bank connection but send money later after approval?
Growth Design: Design decisions
Motivation 2: How might we allow users to cash out before bank connection but still have a delightful experience?
Design Exploration Diagram
Growth Design: Design decisions
Let’s look at one of the design exploration combinations: 1.1 + 2.1 + 3.1. how do we evaluate it?
Growth Design: Design decisions
How do we make a decision not to move forward with this solution?
Through user testing, we got some feedback from users and invalidated some of our design explorations.
Growth Design: Design decisions
We consolidated the feedback and made the final decision.
Growth Design: Design decisions
What is the final in-app experience?
A/B Test Plan
Control: Original funnel(gray text in the diagram below)
-50% on iOS & Android
Variant: Flip the funnel (Black text in the diagram below)
-50% on iOS & Android
Final Result:
Variant: 20% absolute conversion↑ + 2% activation ↑
+ surprisingly a slightly increase in tip rate.
