Improving the onboarding experience for new Alexa plus subscribers.
Alexa is Amazon's cloud-based virtual assistant that uses voice recognition to perform tasks, control smart devices, and provide information through devices like Echo speakers, developed and maintained by Amazon.
Platform: iOS App
Project Duration: 6 Months
Team: 1 Designer (me) and 2PM (Alyssa & Jessica)
Context
Amazon planned to launch a subscription-based version of Alexa, called 'Alexa Plus,' for its existing customers. This upgraded Alexa included new personalization features to encourage both existing and new Alexa customers to subscribe and remain in the Alexa ecosystem. I was hired as a temporary UX design contractor to assist the Alexa Discovery & Onboarding team for 6 months. However, due to time constraints and limited developer resources, we couldn't launch a fully revised onboarding experience. As a follow-up for post-launch, I was tasked with proposing a frictionless, purposeful onboarding experience for first-time Alexa Plus customers.
My Role:The team included two Product Managers and me. We collaborated on user interviews, while I led the research, userflows, wireframes, and the end to end prototype.
Note:I cannot disclose Alexa's AI specific features due to NDA. "Alexa Plus" is the unofficial name of the service.
Problem
Customers who subscribed to Alexa Plus were overwhelmed into a long and un-intuitive onboarding process, requiring them to set up features that did not align with their goals (i.e Motivation). Without understanding customer motivations—such as why they subscribed to Alexa Plus—the onboarding experience felt unfulfilling and unintentional. It was like shooting a dart blindly in the dark, hoping it hits the target.
Note: "Progressive Onboarding" is a method of gradually reminding customers about Alexa's new capabilities through notifications and cards, encouraging them to complete feature setups to get the most out of their subscription.
Problem Breakdown:Through our internal research, the broader team and I identified several key issues:
- Forced Onboarding: Customers were pushed to complete the entire onboarding process with no option to skip to the app's home page. This frustrated those who didn't want to set up immediately right after subscribing.
- Untailored Feature Setups: Feature setups were not tailored to individual customer motivations, resulting in irrelevant recommendations that did not meet user needs.
- No Centralized View: There was no single place for customers to view, manage, and continuously discover features, limiting their control.
- Lack of Incentives: There were no incentives to encourage customers to complete the onboarding process.
How might we make the onboarding process for Alexa Plus more purposeful, ensuring each step aligns with the user's motivations and provides immediate value?
Solution
To improve customer onboarding experience, we must…
- Make Onboarding Flexible: Make onboarding easily accessible and allow customers to start onboarding at their convenience, without making it feel forced.
- Tailored Setups: Gather customer motivations to offer tailored feature setups. If a user's primary goal is smart home control, Alexa will prioritize those setups in their onboarding.
- Offer Incentives: Provide rewards to incentivize users to complete their onboarding.
Why tailoring the onboarding experience based on customer's motivations solve the problem?
- Personalization: Highlighting features and content most relevant to each user makes the onboarding experience feel more valuable and engaging from the start.
- Value: Accelerates the user's path to experiencing Alexa Plus’ value, increasing the likelihood of continued engagement.
- Reduced Churn Rate: By aligning the app experience with the customer's goals from the beginning, customers can experience the value proposition quicker, making them less likely to unsubscribe from the service.
Motivations are categorized based on the feature/setup types.
Competitors
To define best practices, I examined how leading competitors onboard users to features.
Apple Home:For customer who prefer autonomy for setting up features, they have the option to explore and setup features at their own convenience under the “Discovery” tab.
Apple Home App: Discovery
Google Assistant App
Google Assistant:Simple and intuitive onboarding that allows customers to see what the assistant can do before choosing to set up. Customers can also unlock core features whenever by tapping the “Get Started” prominent bottom banner.
Customer flow
The PM’s and I brainstormed on the overall onboarding flow to gather quick feedback from stakeholders. We aligned on the following flow:
Newly subscribed customers will be prompted with a bottom sheet right after they land on the Alexa App home page. From there, they can choose to “Get Started” now or later. If they choose to get started, they’ll be asked about their goals/motivation, rank selected motivations they want to prioritize for the initial onboarding and choose a feature under that motivation to begin setup.
Right after setup completion, customers are rewarded by trying out the feature they just setup. Under “for you” in home, customers will see a tile (“get started” if they haven’t started or “Keep going” if they partially completed their setups) reminding them to complete their onboarding in order to take full advantage of Alexa Plus.
Sketches
Rough sketches of the core pages to quickly get ideas out and get feedback.
Wireframes
A more refine wireframe of the core pages based on internal feedback.
Welcome to Alexa Plus: Customer gets prompted with a bottom sheet to welcome them to Alexa Plus. Tapping on “Get started” ingresses them to the onboarding experience.
Welcome bottom sheet
Confirm Motivation
Confirm Motivation:Existing Alexa customers expect Alexa to know a thing or two about them. If a customer has an echo device and uses it as a smart home control, we can assume that controlling their smart home is one of the motivations they have for using this service.
Progressive Onboarding Tile:The tile sits under “for you” in Home to remind customers about completing their Alexa Plus onboarding and stays there for 30 days. After that period, customers can ingress to the central hub from their settings. Using a radial “progress bar” to show customer’s progression adds a sense urgency to complete onboarding.
Why use a progress bar?
The Zeigarnik effect suggests that unfinished tasks are more memorable than completed ones. In UX design, we can leverage this effect to encourage user engagement and task completion.
Alexa Home
Central Hub
Continuous Discovery (Central Hub): Customers can explore and complete setups relevant to their motivations.
Prototype
User Interviews
After ideating and iterating based on internal feedback, the product manager and I have recruited a total of 8 existing Alexa customers for a moderated user interview to get feedback and validate my proposal.
Goals for the testing were to:
- Test which onboarding experience (conversational vs manual screen based experience) works best.
- Test the “motivation” concept and if that makes sense to customers
- Test the “reward” approach and if that increases momentum for customers to continue setup after completing one.
- Test discoverability and value of the central hub.
We recruited three groups that reflect Alexa’s core users for the user interview.
Current Alexa Users:Existing subscribers seeking value from Alexa Plus.
Super Users: Dedicated users who actively discover features through external sources (YouTube, newsletters, etc.).
Casual Users:Engage primarily in the first few weeks and discover new features when prompted.
Key Findings
Below are the following findings based on the user interviews.
What didn’t work:Conversational experience not as intuitive. Most users struggled to clearly articulate their motivations during conversations. 7 out of 8 users preferred selecting motivations through a screen-based interface for greater clarity, ease of follow-up, and better control compared to a conversational approach.
Solution: Remove the conversational experience until we gather more user feedback on this approach.
Chat with Alexa
Incentivize customers with rewards
Didn’t work:Incentives are not rewarding enough.
While users appreciated the proposed incentives, 6 out of 8 users wanted more options, such as changing Alexa's voice or a 30-day free trial of Amazon Music or Prime Video.
Solution:Propose other incentives, including suggestions that customers have mentioned to see if there will be any impact on the total # of customers that would complete their onboarding based on those incentives.
What worked:Asking customers about their motivation to increase onboarding completion rate.
Tailoring the onboarding experience based on customer’s motivations was a “no brainer” (customer feedback).
Users agreed that onboarding should be tailored to their motivations and didn't mind sharing preferences upfront.
Confirm Motivation
Central Hub
What worked: Making it easier to view all feature setups in a centralized place improves onboarding completion rate.
Customers appreciated having a central hub to manage active features, which gave them a sense of control. This also helps customers who may not have time to go through the initial onboarding process and enables privacy-conscious customers the ability to view and manage data access they’ve authorized to Alexa.
Outcome
The prototype was well-received by internal stakeholders, with most customer feedback (from user interview sessions) validated our proposal. Our goal was to give customers the autonomy to tailor their onboarding at their own pace than to overwhelm them with a bloated onboarding process and I believe with this proposal, there would be less churn and increased customer satisfaction.
Goals for the testing were to:
We defined the following metrics to evaluate onboarding success after launch:
- Setup Completion Rate: Targeting 40% of users completing one or more setups immediately after subscribing.
- Incentive Impact: Aim for 50% of users to complete two or more setups with the aid of incentives.
- Feature Exploration: Ensure that at least 60% of customers understand where to explore and manage all features.
Next step:We will analyze success metric once the revised onboarding experience is launched to the public and iterate based on the data.