Tinybeans User Activation
This project aims to enhance user education and highlight the full value of our app by guiding users step-by-step through its key features. While our current onboarding process has been deemed easy to navigate, data show that 80% of users skip the onboarding and land on the home page without a clear understanding of the next steps. This leads to confusion, limiting their ability to fully explore and engage with the app’s capabilities.
Team
PM, lead designer (me), copywriter, data analyst, android & iOS developers, QA.
Timeline
3 months
Target audience
New Journal Holders are first-time users exploring the app for the first time. Our typical user is an intentional parent, particularly mothers, who are busy and often overwhelmed, yet take pride in being the cornerstone of their family.
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These users seek a safe, judgment-free space that connects like-minded, intentional parents, providing a supportive community for sharing and organizing family memories.
WHAT DATA SAYS
80%
80% of new iOS users skip the app's onboarding tutorial.
40%
On day one, 40% of them create a child profile.
30%
On day one, 30% of those who skip onboarding upload at least one photo.
60% of our new users often stop using the app within the first week of registration. We also know that users who stay active by creating their child’s profile and uploading a photo within 30 days are likely to remain engaged in the app for 5+ months.
WHAT USERS SAY
4/5
Users skipped the onboarding without realizing it, clicking 'maybe later' without paying attention.
4/5
Users were struggling to add family and friends to their account. It was difficult to find and add them using only emails.
3/5
Users didn’t know how to get started after registering. They kept scrolling up and down the home feed.
5/5
Users were unclear about the app's purpose and value, leading to confusion about how to engage with its features.
GOALS
Our goal is to ensure that end users complete key actions, such as adding their first photo, creating a child profile, and inviting family members, within the first 7 days. Achieving this will increase the number of users who remain with us for 5+ months.
LIMITATIONS
This project does not focus on a full onboarding redesign due to limited resources and time. Instead, we implemented small improvements, such as refining screen connections and enabling multiple photo uploads for a smoother user experience. A complete onboarding redesign is planned for a future quarter.
We needed to break the larger project into smaller deliverables, which posed design challenges. This included variations with and without: new navigation, friend and family UI improvements, and the ability to load user memories on the homepage, requiring careful consideration for a cohesive user experience.
Due to limited resources and tight timelines, we prioritized redesigning low-hanging fruit that could deliver immediate impact. Our goal was to maximize user enjoyment and excitement through these targeted improvements, ensuring a more engaging experience despite the constraints.
Ad Placement Considerations. We had to constantly consider when and where ads would appear on the pages. Some exciting ideas were canceled because the ad-occupied places limited our options. This required us to choose less exciting, but more feasible ideas that would work with ad placements. Some of the problematic pages are Calendar and Home.
DESIGN
After conceptualizing and proposing features, we, as a team, ultimately prioritized this set of features as the most promising and worth A/B testing. We also split up some larger features into smaller tests, with the home feed actionable screen and action modules being the first to be tested and launched.
First Photo Uploading
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Clear and straightforward call to action on the home feed.
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For these 80% of users who skipped the onboarding, we will show again the improved photo uploading flow.
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Smooth navigation to the next steps, such as adding a child or family member.
Discoverability & Actionable Empty States
During user interviews, we discovered that 4 out of 5 users were unaware of features like albums and grids, and 2 out of 5 users didn’t fully understand the offerings of our key feature, the calendar.
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The new navigation highlights hidden features and makes them easier to explore.
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Actionable empty states explain the purpose of each page and share insights with users, helping them understand that completing these actions will provide the most benefits.
Homefeed Action Modules
We've made key improvements based on user feedback to enhance the experience for new and existing users by adding real-time memories to the home feed and actionable modules.
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Previously, the home feed displayed flashbacks, articles, and posts from journal followers, leaving journal owners with limited content, which many found uninteresting to scroll through. Users expressed a desire to see their own posts more prominently.
Managing Photos Posted to Past Dates
We frequently encounter cases where users may lose track of their recently uploaded photos. This typically happens when they post to a past or future date.
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We’ve updated our calendar to prevent users from posting to future dates and added a clear indicator for photos posted to the past.
We increased the size of the journal name and cleared the space around it, making it easier to locate and switch between journals.
Discoverability for adding family
Improvements to the "More" screen have made it easier for users to manage their journals. Users can now easily find options to add family and friends to each journal at any time. Additionally, they can quickly see how many members each journal has, providing a clearer understanding of their audience. These enhancements improve overall navigation and user engagement with journal management features.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What I've learned
User needs: There can be a disconnect between what users say and their actual needs. For instance, a user may describe the onboarding as quick, simple, and smooth, but if they get stuck on the first page of the app, it indicates that the onboarding process didn’t effectively fulfill its purpose.
Trade offs: The way a product is built can limit how flexible it is for future changes. Even small or exciting ideas can face challenges. Talking to engineers early helps you understand what’s possible and ensures your design fits with the business goals, deadlines, and resources available.
Collaboration: Great ideas and useful feedback don't just come from users. Involving engineers, marketing, data analytics, and QA early in the design process helps you get new ideas, spot potential problems, and make the design stronger from the beginning.
No two projects have the same approach. Ideally, I would follow a structured framework: research, ideate, prototype, test, refine, develop, and launch. However, some design stages can be shortened, and projects may be postponed, leading to new insights. Sometimes, we may deliver only 20% of a project, which might not be the most important problem solutions.