Designing an onboarding flow with a 77% completion rate
As the entryway into a product with a complex set of value props and a lengthy set of steps to utilize the product to its fullest extent, an intuitive onboarding flow was essential to capturing users. I spent the better part of a year designing multiple iterations, creating robust prototypes with animation and text entry, running user tests every 3 weeks, and ultimately launching an onboarding flow that boasts a 77% completion rate.
Client
Movies Anywhere
Role
Product design
High-fidelity prototyping
User research
User testing
Competitive analysis
Tools
Sketch
Atomic.io
Invision
Principle
Axure
UserTesting.com
Educating users
Movies Anywhere is all about consolidation— it’s a cross-platform experience where you link your various retailer accounts to one library that movies flow in to and out of, but we encountered multiple challenges in our journey to help users understand that.
The challenge
By way of user testing, we learned early on how rarely users would actually read the copy put in front of them, even in a moderated testing environment. This made it challenging to explain complex value props in a clear and concise way.
Original agency design
We quickly discovered that most of the original agency designs hadn’t been created with UX in mind, such as this welcome screen which lacks value props and education.
Visualizing library consolidation
The first internal iteration on the welcome screen leaned into a short sentence and simple visual of multiple retailers being consolidated into Movies Anywhere. Very few users read the copy and the visual wasn’t clear enough.
Video background
Showing clips from movies that fans know and love proved to be highly compelling, but ultimately distracted users from our value prop messaging, which was more important.
The solution
As we ran more user testing sessions and finalized our branding, we became more focused in our goals and messaging in general, resulting in the cold open experience that we launched with.
All your movies in one place
As we incorporated our new branding across the product, we worked closely with our marketing design counterparts to visualize our most important value prop: library consolidation.
Your library goes where you go
The next value prop that we found valuable from both a user and business perspective was our cross-platform streaming and downloading functionality.
Free to use
During user testing sessions, we found that users gravitated towards the word “free” but we tested multiple copy options before finding one that made it clear that the service is free, not the movies themselves.
Sunsetting Disney Movies Anywhere
Before Movies Anywhere there was Disney Movies Anywhere— the Disney-only platform that built the KeyChest digital licensing technology that would go on to power Movies Anywhere as we expanded to five studios and additional retailers.
The challenge
With the impending release of Movies Anywhere, Disney Movies Anywhere was going to be sunsetted entirely and all of their users needed to be migrated onto the new platform within a few months of launch or risk losing their accounts altogether. Because many Disney Movies Anywhere users created their accounts years ago, we predicted a large influx of customer service requests for forgotten logins and passwords, so we had to find creative technical solutions.
Log in with password
The initial migration dialog required users to remember their old email address and password and in multiple instances, users assumed they had to re-enter the login info they’d just created a few steps earlier.
Technical solutions to pain points
By brainstorming solutions with our engineering team, we found a way to authenticate users without the need for a password and to display the number of movies they’d import over from their previous account.
Brand consistency
After we implemented our new branding across the product, we moved towards a version of the dialog that was more consistent with the rest of the experience and accounted for the readability of error states.
The solution
After running multiple user tests with a variety of designs, we found the right balance of branding, value props, and frictionless authentication that resonated with users.
Less friction, more incentives
The migration dialog we launched with incorporated passwordless authentication, our new branding, and a focus on how many movies would be added to their library.
Parental controls
Because a large percentage of Disney Movies Anywhere users were parents handing a device to their children, we made it a point to highlight the ability to create a kid’s profile in their new Movies Anywhere account.
Key takeaways
A product with as many unique features and moving parts as Movies Anywhere required us to challenge and validate our assumptions via frequent user testing. Ultimately, it paid off as user sentiment grew more and more positive with each subsequent iteration of our flows.
Comprehensive vs essential
Of the dozens of prototypes we designed and tested with users, one of the most important was A/B testing two versions of onboarding— a comprehensive flow with every valuable step up front and a bare bones flow that focused on minimizing drop-off. We found that the latter successfully minimized drop-off and increased the likelihood that users would link retailers and redeem digital codes when asked to do so in context as they explored the app.
Comprehensive
Surfacing all steps up front results in the most valuable user that has linked their retailers, imported their movies, redeemed their digital codes, and migrated over their Disney Movies Anywhere account.
However, this flow proved to be cumbersome and left users with a lack of context as to why they should perform all these steps right now.
Essential
By simplifying the flow down to the bare essentials and getting users into the app as quickly as possible, we reduced the likelihood of drop-off due to friction, but ran the risk of users never completing the remaining high-value actions.
We opted to prompt users to link their retailers, import their movies, and redeem their digital codes in context, such as when they visited their “My Movies” page or attempted to purchase a movie.
Social sign in
Our initial plan was to limit account creation to social sign in since it reduced technical complexity, but we learned from user testing that most of our users heavily preferred to create an account manually using email and password. Their rationale was largely centered around privacy concerns and/or not having a Facebook or Google account to begin with. Once we made the decision to support email account creation, we then had to design and implement forgot password flows and email verification flows via Okta.
Social sign in
Full flow with email
Avoiding oversimplification
Early versions of onboarding presented both new and returning users with the same starting point, which was a single CTA to “get started” but we learned that our attempt to be clever and simplify this flow actually ended up causing confusion that had users second guessing themselves. We got drastically better feedback from users once we reintroduced two individual “sign up” and “log in” CTAs and flows.
Before
After
Results (in the first year)
77%
sign up completion rate
150 million
purchased movies added
16 million
hours of movies streamed
6 million
user accounts
What people are saying
“It strips away all the clutter that you find in other places: the original series, the streaming options you may or may not care about. If you’re in the mood for just a movie you love enough to already own, the argument goes, Movies Anywhere can get you there better than anything.”
“Movies Anywhere is simply great in a very "wait, these companies are working together?" way, if you ask me. To think that Amazon, Apple and the like would allow their online sales platforms to work together is utterly surprising.”
“There are some signs that Movies Anywhere is off to a solid start. Users of the service streamed over 3 million hours worth of content in the first two months of its operation…Consumers also stored 80 million individual titles in their lockers in those first two months.”
“Since its October 2017 launch, Movies Anywhere has largely been a largely smooth experience for most CNET staff who have used it. That's probably a testament to the fact that the underlying infrastructure from Disney Movies Anywhere has already been tried and tested.”