Whatbook
What is Whatbook?: A book and social media app that is designed to connect readers and help them find their next read.
The Problem: Users were downloading Whatbook and not leaving reviews for books they had read. How might we engage users immediately during onboarding to add value?
Approach
My role: UX Research & Design
Timeline: 2 Weeks
Goal: Increase Review and Rating percentage to get engagement with books in app.
DISCOVER
Methodologies: Heuristic Analysis, Comparative Analysis, and User Surveys.
Before beginning to dive in to what sort of components are in an Onboarding Flow, I analyzed the entire app to find where users were either meeting dead ends in their search or rating process. As the goal of the Onboarding was to get a user to leave a review, I looked into why a user would even be doing so in the first place. The app had plenty of drop off points, so I focused on an easy Onboarding that would engage them quickly with little steps.
Survey Goals:
- Tell me whether or not a user would read a review.
- Tell me if a user would put in the effort to leave a review.
According to the survey, user's were more likely to leave a review if it was a book that they loved. However, the way they interacted with reviews was what surprised me.
Users were more likely to read reviews yet not leave a review for just any book they had read. This posed my first roadblock: how do you make a user leave a review if they just want to read them?
DEFINE
Methodologies: User Flow
Taking in the idea that a user would rather leave a review for a book they like, I focused on engaging a user with a favorite or even a classic, before pushing them to follow users that also like that specific book or books that are similar to it.
DESIGN
When it came to design, I wanted to keep with the branding that Whatbook had in place. Consistent design would allow users to recognize the app, but I wanted to add some fun elements to add to Whatbook's Tone of Voice. Since the company is still a startup, their Tone was still being developed and discovered.
Following the User Flow, I focused on making the copy (text) easy to read and follow with so the user did not feel like they were being overloaded with information on how to use the app.
The first step was to create a username to personalize the experience, once the user did that, they could move into finding books that they wanted to read. Focusing on favorites: the prompt to search was present.
Keeping the ratings and reviews present, I wanted to make sure that information that the user wanted was still visible. This is linked back to user's wanting to read reviews rather than write them.
Since the app is still in the startup stages, I made sure there was the happy path of reviewing a book that already had reviews written by others, but also a path where they would be told they were the inaugural review for a novel they loved.
Following the review prompt screen, the user was given options to follow users that also enjoyed that book, or were active and popular users on the app.
Usability Testing
- Users had the goal to search for their favorite book and leave a review
- Users should not want to skip!
Test Results
- Average time to complete: 47 seconds.
- Average user decided to search for their book and did not bother with the books that were offered as suggestions, and instead followed the prompting.
- Users enjoyed seeing the books that were offered from other user's libraries and followed them based on that.
Impact
Whatbook had an increase of 127% in the user written reviews from Onboarding, and a 60% increase in users following other users.
NEXT STEPS
Continue to analyze the user interaction during onboarding for the current goal of getting a user to leave a review. As the business grows and changes, different business goals will be added such as: Allowing notifications, importing contacts, and selecting favorite genres.
