Redesigning the onboarding flow to reduce user drop-offs - Cowrywise

Cowrywise is a savings and investment product that helps Nigerians save and invest for their goals with as little as $1. Savings and investment plans created must be locked for a minimum of 3 months in order to gain interests and enable users build better savings habits.

Project Details

My Role

I owned the research and design process, end-to-end. I set up a research and testing plan, extracting insights from customer feedback , to designing, prototyping the entire flow and working with engineers.

Year

2019

Team

Myself, Mobile Engineers, Product Manager, Customer Success team.

Problem Discovery

3 out of 5 users were not able to complete the account creation process and that led to them dropping off.

What was happening?

I worked with the Customer experience team to gather insights about the type of feedback they were getting from users especially around account creation. We extensively pored through the emails, social media got in touch with the users that had complains about not been able to sign up. A lot of the issues had to do with users not getting OTP’s ( One time Password)

To ensure that users are who they say they are, users were required to verify their phone numbers in order to complete the sign up process, they had to enter their phone numbers so a one time password can be sent to that number to verify it.It turned out that a good number of users were not getting that OTP or in some cases, it came in much later resulting in users getting frustrated and dropping off.

Why were users not getting their OTP’s?

After I’d identified what the source of the problem was, I worked with the engineering team and Product Manager to learn why users were not getting their OTP’s and what other alternatives we could use to verify our users. This was the summary of my conversation.

Cause

Users not getting the one time password was largely a network issue and it was beyond our control.

Why phone numbers?

We used phone numbers as a way to verify users but it wasn’t also very secure especially for a fintech product.

It was clear that while phone numbers were important they were not entirely reliable. It was important to find another way to verify our users but also make sure the new solution was secure

Old account creation flow

Goal

Ensure that users are able to complete the sign up process seamlessly thereby reducing drop off rates

Proposed solution

It was important that whatever solution I came up with allows users complete the account creation process seamlessly while still making sure that the users identity is verified while being seciurity compliant. To make more informed decisions, I took a look at similar fintech products in the Nigerian market, how their onboarding was done and what we could learn from them, this helped me come up with the following solutions.

1. Introduction of 4 - digit PIN

Existing users already had a 4 digit PIN they used to send money out of the app. I proposed the idea of making new users create a PIN alongside their passwords as a second layer of authentication. This could help make the product more secure and reduce the occurence of fraud.

2. Bank Verification Number - BVN

Every bank holder in Nigeria has a unique identifier called a BVN and this was the best way to verify a users information and confirm that they are indeed who they say they are.

New account creation flow

Impact and lessons learnt

87%

Three months after this redesign was launched, conversion rates went up to 87%.

32s

We were able to reduce the time from to create an account/onboard a user so that users can get started with using the product. The average time to complete account set up reduced to 32 seconds from 1 minute

The onboarding project was successful in making signup easy and seamless for our users. Since launch the product has onboarded over

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