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Increasing the Latitude Sitebuilder+ Day-1 user retention by 126% with new onboarding functionality

Making a website creation more straightforward to increase user retention

Latitude Sitebuilder+ is an all-in-one website-building platform that helps users to establish a professional-looking online presence.

One of Yola’s value propositions to customers is the ease of use for people with zero experience to create a complete website in hours. We assumed that the new initial site setup approach and filling the website with predefined blocks depending on user goals would simplify the website creation process and improve some of the target metrics (Day 1 retention, publish rate, and user activation). We tested this hypothesis and came up with a completely new solution – straightforward onboarding.

Context / ProcessUsability testing / User study / Ongoing research / Updated vision / Solution & Results

/Overview

Switching to a completely new onboarding process

The Product team identified the increasing Latitude user engagement as a part of the product strategy, and this initiative supported one of our OKRs. We noticed that Yola Latitude B2C had a low average percentage of users who returned to edit their site. This metric needed to be increased as a leading indicator for new user engagement.

I explored ways to increase the retention rate...

I did the competitor's analysis to investigate different approaches to website building starting points. Also, we had the results of user interviews where we asked about user motivation to build the website. Based on these two points, we came up with the idea to develop the site setup around the user goals and their motivation to create a website: to sell products/services, to get leads, to showcase their work, etc.

Since there was an existing pattern (we asked users for basic info about their website) and it has yet to demonstrate successful results, we decided to develop and test a new one.

We switched from the form-based approach to clear, concise step-by-step guidance connected to users' jobs. We assumed that providing a ready-to-publish version of the website achieved after the successful completion of the site setup would be a better starting point for the user, thereby positively affecting target metrics.

... and formulated a new hypothesis to test

If we provide our users with an initial site setup built around their goals, then they will be more engaged, making fewer mistakes and solving their goals more efficiently, thereby increasing the Day-1 retention, publish rate, and user activation.

After defining a high-level algorithm for this functionality, I quickly created the low-fidelity prototype so that another designer could start working on the interactive prototype, and thereby I could get prepared for the usability testing.

The interactive prototype in Protopie (open)

Learning from a live experience

I prepared a list of open-ended questions that we expected would keep our users from giving  biased answers. Our main goal was to understand if this hypothesis makes any sense. Also, we had the list of questions to get answers during the usability testing:

  • Who are our respondents?
  • Users' triggers and goals to create a website
  • Their experience with website building
  • What other services do they use to run the business? Appointments, Booking, Scheduling, etc.
Did the hypothesis work? No.

As a result of usability testing with 5 respondents, we understood that the step-by-step site wizard and the concept of goal-driven site setup intended to achieve a ready-to-publish website didn’t make sense.

But we gained valuable insights:

Insight #6

Respondents tend to start with website design rather than the content and cared a lot more about visuals

Insight #1

Respondents don’t think about their goals while setting up the site as we expected them to

Insight #4

Respondents focused on their jobs to be done rather than on their goals

Insight #5

Respondents emphasized  they want to build their site incrementally, not having to enter the data immediately

Insight #3

Respondents emphasized that the end result was missing multiple functions they’d want to add

Insight #2

Respondents don’t have a clear picture of the result they will achieve after completing site setup

We started the user study with an interview and unmoderated usability testing. It was evident that Maria didn't clearly understand the result she wanted to achieve and wanted to start site building, skipping the pre-setup process. After switching from unmoderated to moderated study, Maria immediately became a lot more engaged in the process.

The moderated site-building process helped Maria prevent mistakes, keep her focus, and progress with her site much faster.

Conducting a deep user study to get how users build their sites today

As we were still looking for a way to increase retention and user engagement, we conducted a deep user study. Our motivation was:

  • Find out user motivation to create a website
  • Get a sense of what the JTBD means from the user's perspective
  • Check whether users indeed think of their JTBD while building a website
  • Get examples of real JTBD from users
  • Understand what a "completed website" means to users
  • Get additional insights.

Our respondent – Maria Afonina

BIO & Habits

22 years old. Based in Lviv, Ukraine.

  • Fitness trainer (self-employee)
  • Has a busy life and is often on the go
  • Has no experience in creating websites
goals

Goals she’s expecting to reach by having a website:

  • to promote her services
  • get more customers
  • to have an online booking for training sessions.

Building UX around user JTBD

We continued the user study to better understand our users' motivation and barriers. We manually reviewed 20+ users' sessions and launched the in-app survey to determine the obstacles users struggle with when getting their jobs done.

As we discovered, users' barriers to creating a site were:

  • Feeling helpless and insecure about where to begin
  • Fear of "I can't do it myself," anxiety of getting nobody else involved
  • Frustration because of many website-building elements (hosting, domain, design, coding, etc.)
  • Inability to promote the brand online, find recognition, or create a trustworthy brand

I was working on defining users' jobs-to-be-done and created a UX map for  user studies according to the ODI framework focusing attention on users' actions and context to understand them better. 

The UX map (combining CJM and JTBD)

As a result of user research, our approach to new user engagement was fundamentally changed. We updated the hypothesis again and switched from a goal-driven site setup to users' archetype self-classification and personalized user onboarding. That would simplify the site setup and guide the user using platform functions.

So, we concentrated on the Website assistant as part of onboarding and formulated a new vision: a good learning curve is a leading indicator of successful users.

updated vision

Guide the User, not Lead the User

That demonstrated successful results. Not only users became more involved in the site creation process, but the qualitative and quantitative analyses showed positive dynamics. 

As a result, there’s a growth in target metrics for this project:

Day-1 Retention

️126%

Activation rate

️+ 6.4%

Publish rate

️+ 10.3%

/Let's talk/

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