Scribd | Q3 2019

Question Based Personalization

Scribd’s first entry into having new user onboarding

Scribd is a digital subscription that offers instant access to the best ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, magazines, sheet music, and documents through any web browser, Android, or iOS device

Overview

Time to launch

3 weeks design
2 weeks dev
Team structure

1 Designer- Me!
1 Product manager
1 Technical product manager
3 Developers
1 QA Engineer
Testing methods

UserTesting
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

Why this project matters to me

When I first joined Scribd in 2017, there was no onboarding experience for new users. A user could sign up for a free trial, download the file they came in for, and it wasn’t until the cancellation flow that a user would be shown premium content included in their subscription. Having an opportunity to make a massive change like this was really exciting

Why this project matters to our users

For a user with little to no idea of what Scribd is, welcoming them in and working to understand their interests and needs proactively allows the user to better understand Scribd while helping us better serve them. A better educated user is a more empowered user

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

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 lat

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 in Onboarding

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.

Also worth noting, if a user scrolls down, the header collapses so only the CTA remains at the top

Completion Screen

This is just to reflect that a user is now ready to return to the product, and that onboarding is complete

App intro refresh results

Analysis period: 08/04/2021 - 09/08/2021
Total assignments in test: 530K (evenly split across two variants)

iOS

Accounts Created

+13.8%

Searched within 7 days

+7.8%

Viewed a preview page within 7 days:

+8.4%

Opened content within 7 days:

+4.1%

Android