Ellis Mobile Onboarding, Ellis

International students face language barriers, unfamiliarity with local data networks, and the complexities of setting up straightforward mobile telecom services can quickly add stress to an already overwhelming journey.

The business saw significant numbers of users dropping off and plan cancellations post-activation of Ellis Mobile.

Tons of frustrated Customer Success tickets from international students were piling up during our growth marketing efforts. I collaborated closely with our Customer Success team, because they were the closest to valuable, qualitative data.

We identified 2 critical problem areas across the current onboarding process; Extended Delays from user errors and Perceived Dark Patterns.

Working with these insights from the close collaboration with the Customer Success team, I conducted a UX audit to pinpoint additional, critical problem areas that were leading users to dropping off.

My primary goal while conducting a UX audit was to identify any design flaws in the Ellis Mobile onboarding experience, and then use these findings to understand where the opportunities for improvement in the onboarding system lie.

I centered my hypotheses on 5 main approaches.

First iterations were presented to the Head of Design, CTO, and CEO. Gaining their valuable feedback led to further alignment and refinement on the hypotheses I detailed beforehand, validating Priming, Reorder Default Flow, State Confirmation and more refinements around Enhancing Plan Selections and Optimizing Checkout Systems.

The new variation afforded international students a less intensive interaction on a crucial screen by just scrolling vertically, updated with the new brand guidelines.

We also decided it would be better to lessen the visual hierarchy of the Maybe Later at the bottom of the previous iterations, localizing it to the top right, in order to call out the Choose Plan primary button with greater visual weight.

We added another double check at the bottom where the Proceed to Payment exists, since it would further emphasize the promotional discount with the legal disclaimer copy provided by the CEO and allow international students verify the subscription they're choosing to select before making their payment.

Given the tight timeframe before the new semester and our early-stage status of a startup, as a team, we made the call to prioritize getting the solution out quickly. A/B testing and extensive prototyping were not feasible at this point in time.

We planned for rapid iterations based on post-launch feedback from support tickets and early analytics. Our intention as a team was to build towards better data-driven practices, but our first objective was to simply ship the first iteration with the new redesign and brand guidelines.

The Ellis Mobile onboarding revamp launched alongside the overall Ellis rebrand in Q1 2023. The positive response was immediate:

Building towards data driven design practices through the use of telemetry for automated monitoring, identifying and signalling critical moments in the onboarding journey, before, during and after Ellis Money activation. All of these efforts in order to build a more robust infrastructure for platform analytics, to inform the business of user behaviors, needs and product health.