WollenDance Web & Mobile
Perfecting "Register" feature to improve user engagement
I lead the UX/UI work for this project. I organized design critic meetings, conducted usability testings, and initiated user interviews throughout the project. In addition, I worked closely with development team to estimate the constraints and cost of building this feature. After launch, I tracked impact and user feedback, and moved forward to making improvements.
Challenge
We have been receiving feedback from instructors about their hope to know how their class is performing. One of their pain points is that they are losing incentive to teach class since there's no way to get real time feedback from students. The sense of community is important.
The design team begins to think what we can build to bring back that in-person teacher and student relationship.
Currently, we offer "set reminder" for users to register for all the classes at once. This makes registering for certain classes very convenient, however, users become mindless using it and it's hurting their trust in WollenDance. Because we don't directly manage studios and instructors, instructors cancel classes because of personal injury etc. We've heard feedback from students of missing notifications on these canceled classes.
Research
Unlike many of our competitors, 80% of WollenDance classes are weekly recurring. This means making user to Register for each individual class will create frictions. I came up with two hypothesis on users response. One, users won't mind registering for each weekly class. Two, users would want an option to register for future recurring classes with one click.
These two hypothesis comes from insights into two major user journeys of using "count me in". Type 1 users like to attend the same weekly classes. Type 2 users like to try different live classes. It improves business if more users will try more classes. The core question is, how do we satisfy these two user behaviors and class types?
Form insights
When I started to design the Register feature, I focused mainly on UIs on the website. That was proved to be off track after I did 4 interviews with current users. These are the key insights I got about the "set remider" feature:
" No frustration setting the reminder itself - however, I don't check my inbox as often and tend to miss the reminder emails. It would be great if there was an "add to calendar" option or if we could sign up for text alerts."
" I like the automatic reminder. I do have some reminders set that I don't get."
Apparently, having users rely on mail box to get class reminders hasn't been effective as intended. We notify our users when the live schedule is changed and when the live class is about to begin. This frequency of notifications might actually leads to key messages being buried in users' mail box.
This aligns with our observations that users complained about unexpected schedule change even though we sent out notifications. This eventually hurt users' trust in the product.
From the interviews, we also gathered that users find push or text notifications more useful than email. Sometimes they are not beside their computer before the class.
How overwhelming inbox looks nowadays
Form insights
Before I jump into design, I worked to unpack users' mental model when taking a class series.
How do we encourage users to register by keeping the efforts minimum? I proposed three different flows to discuss with the team and stakeholders. Each flow has its pros and cons.
These are the questions that I come up with to help decide which flow works best:
1. what types of classes we are going to have in the next few years?
2. Is weekly recurring still going to be a big characteristic for the dance classes?
3. What're new users reaction to each flow, considering many of them don't have the idea of "recurring classes" when they just land the page.
4. What's current users' feedback about having to register for each individual class?
Unfortunately, we didn't have clear answers to the questions above. Combing through the research and brainstorming the context users do before, during and after a live class allows me to create three potential flows for this feature. Keeping the feature function at a high-level allowed me to explore design solutions that I could easily communicate to our team and stakeholders.
Form insights
After conducting in-depth interviews with instructors and students, I created personas to constantly guide design decisions, priorities, goals, and create empathy amongst the team.
Through careful analysis of our interviews and data, we identified sufficient behavioral variables to segment our user audience. These variables could be categorized into activities such as frequency of taking dance classes, context such as where they want notifications and motivations such as reasons for registration.
design & validate
I took a top-down approach to defining the overall structure of the registration experience. I listed all the pages where users can register for a class. This includes Studio, Instructor, Live Stream and Live Schedule pages. Then, I listed potential pages for users to manage registered classes, say if they want to deregister or have an overview of the class registered.
This gave me a way to visualize what existing features and content would work together, what opportunities were available to innovate and what could be discarded from the old design.
The most debatable design decision in the early stage is whether it's a dealbreaker for users to register for each class, even for a class series? This decides the core experience of the functionality. I realized the whole structure of this experience relies on this question. I created two design versions to test users and get aligned with their mental model.
" I probably wouldn’t use it if it’s required for each individual class because sometimes I will be using my phone outside and it’s not convenient for me to remember to register for the class."
From the testing, it was clear the current users need to have the option to register for a class series. Based on user data, we knew that 83% users register for no more than 5 class series. We assume using pop-up to offer an option to register for a class series is handleable from user end.Our testing validated that.
Design & Validate
With the old design of the live class card, there was no way for users to tell the difference between one-time class and weekly recurring classes. To solve that, I applied a minor tweak on the class card by adding the date in and move the class duration to a lower visual hierarchy.
The three areas that were most debated inside the team are:
1. show calendar icon before or after registration
2. indicator of how to deregister
3. clarity on each class card represents one individual live class
After weighing up the strengths and weakness of my explorations with the design team, I narrowed down to 3 competing design concepts.
I went ahead and tested different versions with 4 participants. The results revealed that:
1. It was clear to new students these cards are for individual class
2. current students still hold the mentality of "set reminder“， and didn't notice the date on the card
3. students would like to have the calendar option
4. it doesn't bother the students they can add to calendar only after they register a class
This aligned with my intention to offer the "add to calendar" option after registration. I spent a lot of time defending this design decision because:
1. from studios' perspective, instructors want name list that's aligned with the reality
2. it's important to encourage users to register rather than add to calendar so that they can receive timely notification if a class is canceled
design detail
My process includes sketching and wire-framing concepts and flows with my design peers and then translating these directly into hi-fidelity design comps.
I've learned prototyping was the most effective way to gain insightful feedback from the team, alignment from engineers and approval from stakeholders and senior leadership. I managed to organize and distribute these as videos and make them reusable for each round of Usability Testing.
