Scribd: Question Based Personalization
Giving users more input into their first experience on Scribd
Overview
-
Time to launch
• 3 weeks design
• 2 weeks development -
Team structure
• 1 Designer- Me!
• 1 Product Manager
• 1 Technical Product Manager
• 3 Developers
• 1 QA Engineer -
Testing methods
• Hotjar
• In product n-way test
Challenge
As a first exploration into having an onboarding experience, we want to help welcome users to Scribd by learning a little bit about them. Help users personalize their Scribd experience by asking them questions during onboarding while educating the user on the types of content in our product offering
Competitive analysis
I looked at a lot of competitors and similar onboarding experiences for this project. Too much to show here, feel free to look through the research deck!
Initial user flow
We wanted to inject this flow into the post-credit card, pre-document page transition
Initial explorations
Intro screen
The user’s goal is to get back to their document as quickly as possible, so I toyed with having a full module emphasizing a way to return to their document (Options A and B.) Predictably, in testing this drew too much attention and the call to personalization was missed entirely. We opted to move forward with something closer to option C
Question screen
We also explored three separate styles for the layout of the question screen. While the more visual approaches did test well, it didn’t allow us any flexibility to have a second line of copy— this is especially important for formats like “Documents” and “Snapshots” as they have a meaning on Scribd which a user wouldn’t expect
A last minute addition to the flow
While we initially planned to ship Question Based Personalization with just the two questions and measure the impact before adding a save experience, it just didn’t make sense to wait on the save screen. We discussed as a squad and adjusted the scope to include the save experience
Save Screen LoFi
Save Screen
So this is very similar to some of the competitive research we saw. We wanted to introduce a save screen that would follow both questions and it would show personalized content based on the inputs to those questions
Final Composites
Welcome Screen
We went with a very minimal welcome screen, and kept a text link to bypass the onboarding (though we did run some forced personalization tests later)
Question 1
Question one is all of the screen content types and we asked a user when content types they enjoy most, this serves a dual purpose of personalization and also showcases product offering
Question 2
Question 2 is about topic. This also is to help personalize the users interests and feed the recommendations engine (as well as the save screen)
Save Screen
We released this with a minimum 3 content saves to proceed. Later, we also ran tests on non-forced saving and multiple other visual layouts.
Completion Screen
This is just to reflect that a user is now ready to return to the product, and that onboarding is complete
Question Based Personalization Results
Analysis Period: 11/22/2019-01/12/2020
% Viewed cancellation
-2.7%
% Cancelled
-1.6%
% Premium Content Read
+14.1%
% Reading at least 10 minutes