Voice App Onboarding Redesign

A voice calling app had drifted years behind Apple's and Google's interface guidelines, and it was losing people in the sign-up wizard before they ever placed a call. I rebuilt the funnel as its own experience with its own measure of success: fewer people giving up. Then I modernized the rest of the app around a reusable symbol library. The mobile user base grew, and the app took Best User Experience and Best Productivity Mobile App at the 2016 W3 Awards.

Two jobs in one mandate: bring the interface up to platform standards, and stop the bleeding in the native sign-up flow.

Onboarding is where a voice app wins or loses somebody. Every screen between downloading it and making the first call shows up in the growth numbers, and this one had a lot of screens.

I owned UX and UI for the voice app and for the new sign-up wizard: the guideline review, personas and experience maps, the style guide and iconography, sketches, wireframes and the final visual design. The call that made the difference was treating the sign-up wizard as its own product, with its own measure of success, which was fewer people giving up before their first call.

I worked most closely with the product manager, who pushed to use onboarding to explain the product's value while I argued for taking screens out. Weekly scrums kept the app modernization and the wizard rebuild moving together.

I opened with a review of the current Apple and Google guidelines, run through weekly scrums, and validated the navigation before anything else moved.

Then I built personas and experience maps, and that is where the sign-up funnel gave itself up. Mapping it screen by screen showed exactly where people were being asked for too much, too early.

A reusable symbol library kept the five rebuilt surfaces consistent across keypad, inbox, voicemail, messages and contacts, five surfaces that had drifted apart over years of separate updates. The sign-up flow went through its own sketches and wireframes into full color, on its own track.

Treating the sign-up wizard as its own product rather than a flow bolted onto the app. It got its own experience map, its own screens and its own measure of success: fewer people giving up.

Cutting rather than adding. There was pressure to use onboarding to explain the product's value: more screens, more selling. Every screen that could come out of the funnel came out. The value is the call working, and nobody believes a feature tour anyway.

Onboarding is usually the highest-value surface in a productivity app, and it is usually the one nobody owns. Making the first few screens effortless paid for itself twice, in growth and in the awards.

What I cannot tell you is how much of the growth was the funnel and how much was the modernization. They shipped together. I would run those separately if I had the chance again.