MOBILE ONBOARDING FLOW FOR A major telecom app

Designing a B2C onboarding flow to drive registration completion & engagement for the 150 million users of the My Verizon app

The Verizon brand had an upgrade and a change in direction to be more approachable, human and conversational. This onboarding flow helped the 150 million My Verizon app users who just purchased a device and/or service to familiarize themselves with the app's features. This was part of an initiative to boost engagement as well as registration completion.

An onboarding experience was proposed a long time ago as a solution to users not engaging with the Verizon brand. This was before Verizon's rebranding into a more modern entity, and the consultants did extensive research and shared their results with the business team. This project was put on hold when the My Fios App got sunset; the priority was merging the My Verizon and My Fios apps and building one coherent experience.

When the onboarding experience came up again, there was no content designer working on it, just a product designer trying to put together some components. There was no alignment on the objectives and goals for this experience. In fact, there was no leadership involvement from design. Some business stakeholders were driving the development.

The product designer's mockups, based on the initial discovery. No content designer yet.

With very little structure and not much direction, this project was the ideal playground for me.

My first priority was to bring together the stakeholders, including design, engineering, business and customer service leadership, and nail down the key objectives of this initiative. This involved checking the team's expectations, pruning the goals for the MVP, and building a progressive roadmap that allowed us to iterate and keep refining and growing the onboarding flow.

This also involved drawing from the initial research and putting together a practical plan that was rooted in UX research.

Capitalizing on the initial discovery

I connected with all the cross-functional stakeholders to understand the big picture and also ramped up using the initial discovery (done by the consultants).

To help refresh the team on the results of this research, I put together a presentation that helped me pull the team back together. This led us to a brainstorming session where we landed on some goals for this onboarding flow.

Reminding the team that building trust and empowering customers was the first priority; marketing should come later.

Aligning stakeholders on goals, priorities and voice

Since there were multiple cross-functional stakeholders, each with their own perspective, I led a workshop to get everyone to share what they thought were the goals for the onboarding flow. What are we setting out to accomplish? What do we like? What do we dislike?

Finding common likes, dislikes and perceptions to bring the team together.

This exercise really helped us narrow down the points where we all agreed. Now all the stakeholders were aligned, and we had a good starting point.

Understanding the user journey

We had pressure from the leadership to cram as many updates as we could into a tight timeline, but I still wanted to ensure we all had clear, specific milestones (instead of a fluid plan everyone could shoehorn new things into).

We first had to define what it meant for a user to be fully onboarded.

Some questions I asked:

What are the critical actions?
What are some nice-to-have, bonus tasks? (This list included the inevitable marketing and paid activities.)
How are we categorizing them and presenting them to the user?
How can we prioritize these into a meaningful roadmap?
What's limiting us? What are the engineering and design constraints at play?

What does it mean to be "fully onboarded"? How should we organize all the actions the user must perform into meaningful categories?

At the end of this step, we had a full list of all the tasks that went into onboarding, different ways to bucket them into categories and releases, and multiple scenarios that could alter the journey for the customer.

The content design process

My favorite part! I took all the input from the stakeholders and studied the initial mockups. I set out to brainstorm the different ways this experience would unfold for the customer.

I divided the tasks into different buckets:

Critical (e.g., complete registration)
Not critical, but important (e.g., security)
Not critical or important, but valuable (e.g., save with paper-free billing)
Personalized nice-to-knows (What to do if..., how to..., where to find...)
Promotions (paid features)

There were also actions and materials that couldn't neatly be categorized. For example, telling the user that perks were available to purchase and could help them save fell right in the middle of promotional materials, value-adds and nice-to-knows.

But that was okay: This was when timing and context came into play. When is this information most relevant for the user? That's when they'd see it.

Laying out the different content design approaches to this onboarding flow.

With all the insights I now had, I was able to propose a content design strategy and help the stakeholders visualize the different approaches to educate, inform and reward the user.

Naming the experience

Side by side, I had to think of a playful but clear name for this experience. One, this helped us all visualize this and solidify the new brand better. Verizon had never done a complicated orientation flow like this before, so this was a new challenge for everyone.

Two, it helped me prevent internal terms from seeping into the product. Engineers, business and customer success all referred to this flow with different names. Design had a creative project name.

I put together a variety of concepts, created word clouds and then classified the concepts into different tones. What were we aiming for? What did we want to come across as?

Brainstorming some playful but clear themes and names for this experience.

I also shared this with the rest of the team and gave them the opportunity to come up with themes and names. This helped put a concrete shape to what different people were envisioning.

Putting myself in the customer's shoes

I built out the flow as the customer would experience it.

What occurrences outside the app (e.g., visiting a store to purchase a device/service) and inside the app (e.g., upgrading a service) influenced the customer's experience?
What did these occurrences trigger inside the app?
Did they all work together to give the customer a cohesive experience?

Based on the insights from the stakeholders and constraints holding us back, I added branches to the flow that would be further refined and modified with each release.

What was in the scope for the MVP?
In future releases, how do we handle something we haven't included in the experience yet?

Apart from these flow-related questions, I also used this opportunity to finalize the content.

Is the terminology consistent?
Is the voice accurately reflecting the Verizon brand?
What are the different tones I needed to use to connect with the customer?
How are we accommodating errors and issues?

Getting clarity on the customer experience and the voice by mapping it all out.

This also helped the understand the overall customer journey better, including the in-store experience leading up to them getting started on the app.

Next steps

If I'd had the time and opportunity, I would push for some testing using some wireframes and/or lo-fi prototypes. I would speak with new customers (i.e., people who'd just purchased a Verizon connection). This was important so I could get answers to the following questions:

What are some disconnects in the ideal in-store experience and the real in-store experience? Are there scenarios I might have to accommodate (e.g., a user having to break an AT&T contract to join Verizon)?
How has the current app experience dropped the ball? Where are the gaps?
Where are these users expecting some handholding? Did they feel stranded anywhere in the process without support?

Aside from listening to their story, I would also test out some content on them.

What can I call this onboarding experience that best shed some clarity on what they were about to get? What would they call this experience?
What's the right order of events in this onboarding flow, according to them? What are their priorities, and how can Verizon address them in a way that builds trust?

I would also experiment with different arrangements and notifications and get a better understanding of what Verizon customers expected from the app.

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