Designing Account Creation
Implementing the sign up (registration) & onboarding process
Overview
CARAMA is a digital platform designed to connect car owners (B2C) to garage owners (B2B) for any car maintenance.
Within CARAMA, car owners can easily find, compare and book a service with a garage that meets their needs.
Our team started an exciting (B2C) project where the goal was to implement the sign up (registration) & onboarding process on our platform for car owners. And afterwards, to create a dashboard for users to see data about the car and their bookings — using a user-centred approach.
Role
User Experience; Wireframing & Prototyping; Strategy; Usability Testing; Data analyses.
Responsibilities
I was part of every phase of this project, where the design team and I had to understand the business context, project timeline, resources, and constraints. And then, I led the design of user flows, wireframes, prototypes, evaluation and the delivery of final designs.
Process
First step first
The big picture of the project: to build the sign-up and onboarding processes, and the dashboard for our users.
With that said, the first step was to understand the goals of the business and the users’ needs.
The idea here was to have a clear definition of the design problem. And, in order to acknowledge how the design could support our goals, we firstly had to understand the business context.
And not less important, we had to investigate users’ goals and needs to understand as much as possible about them and their context, hence making their life as easy as possible with the right balance between simplicity and practicality.
For that, we decided to base our process on the Design Thinking Methodology, a non-linear and iterative process divided into the following phases: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Worth mentioning that we were an Agile team, working in 2 weeks Sprints.
Understanding goals and users
To start with, we organised interviews and activities with our stakeholders capturing project details such as business context, project timeline, resources, constraints (as I mentioned above).
The main questions answered were:
- Why is this feature important?
- What impact does it have on the business?
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- How does this feature benefit the customer?
- What business opportunity does it create?
With that in mind, we were ready to know more about our users’ needs. So it was time to tackle Secondary Research.
Previously, in this project, UX researchers had conducted qualitative and quantitative research with our users (B2C). Therefore, we had already some data defined such as a persona, empathy map, and blueprint.
The most interesting part of this phase was when we found out, by our research, that our current users (B2B – garage owners) were having a difficult time registering to the platform in the current journey. Since we were going to use the same type of user registration (SalesForce), that would also be a problem for our new registration process.
Understanding the current flow
We needed to familiarise ourselves with the current registration flow, that was a fact. The whole process was confusing. It was time for a Heuristic evaluation.
First, when the users were trying to register, they were receiving three different emails — Thank you email; Welcome Email + Link for confirmation; Marketing opt-in email confirmation. It was just too much.
Second, users were not able to sign-up any using social media which, nowadays, I would say it’s a must-to-have in order to simplify sign-in and registration experiences and, at the same time, to provide a convenient alternative to mandatory account creation.
Based on that and on the information gathered from research (we also did some competitor analysis), we started building User Flows As-is and To-be.
I was always working closely with the developers to understand any technical constraints — from third-party service providers or what technology we were and weren’t allowed to use.
We created user flows for 2 different starting points:
1. one where the user would register from the homepage;
2. another where the user would register from the Search & Booking journey (see image above).
Ideation
We also run some ideation workshops to generating ideas and to identify potential new solutions for the problem we were trying to solve — bringing features and functionalities, for instance.
Something I brought it up and that I really like to use in this phase is the User Story technique, where we create user stories using natural language to explore the user’s context and needs.
👨🏻🦰
As a car owner I want to view my bookings so I access information about it anytime.
👩🏽
As a car owner I want to easily find my car information so I save time when booking a new service.
With all research done and ideas flowing, it was time to start to “get our hands dirty”.
In this stage, we came up with ideas for how the sign-up process and onboarding process should look like.
Here are some points we addressed when coming up with solutions/ideas:
- Reduce the number of emails received (when registering) to minimise confusion on where to click.
- Few steps as possible for onboarding to minimise the time
- Make onboarding process friendly and personalised, so users feel unique
- Establishing a painless car registration process
I then mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from the design team, our product owner, the developers, and the rest of the team.
On the onboarding process, I made sure to:
- create a friendly approach.
- to include the total number of steps of the process.
- to add personal customization so the users feel more connected to the product.
- give the user total flexibility to when filling in their details.
Worth mentioning that within a project it’s very common to have technical limitations, and this one was no different.
1. It wasn’t possible to add password creation on the first sign-up modal (due to internal/third-party constraints).
2. Costumers couldn’t identify their vehicle using an automatic vehicle lookup — that would set a new requirement for the project.
As a UX designer, I had to advocate for our users (always!).
Here were our actions to solve the problems mentioned above:
1
That was not a new issue, other members of the team had tried to solve this problem before with no success. Therefore, we tried to tackle the problem from a different perspective: strongly advocating for the implementation of social sign-up (Facebook, Google, and Apple as the most common found in my desk research), meaning that the customer wouldn’t need a password creation.
We raised a new requirement where the user could efficiently identify their vehicle by entering their car registration AND if there was more than one car variant and/or year covered by their car registration, then the consumer would have to be able to select the specific variant and year from a list.
Since that was a long shot due to the involvement of third parties and business agreements, we found a quick win (provisory solution) for this problem — a manual lookup.
When filling out the form, the customer would type their car information, such as Make, Model, Year, and Variant. That solution was anticipating another problem where many of the customers who wouldn’t know their car registration off the top of their head or have it to hand, would then be able to easily fill it out with their car information.
I know this is not the best solution for users. However, in the context that we had (MVP), not finding a quick solution would jeopardize the whole project affecting the business as a whole.
Prototyping time!
With wireframes approved by the design team, Product Owner, and Marketing team, I started working on high-fidelity prototypes. To create the designs I used the Sketch app, and to make it interactive I used Invision Tool — a good way to involve the developers and to gather feedback from the team.
This was the last step before testing with the users, but due to budget limit we decided as a team to get our hands on the dashboard creation.
In order to avoid a really long Study Case, I will divide it into two parts – “Designing Account creation — Dashboard (part 2)”. 🙂
What I learned from this part of the project?
• The Secondary Research, also called Desk Research, was extremely important and helpful for the project. The fact there was already some data defined such as persona, empathy map and blueprint, helped us to accelerate the process of discovery. With that said, it is always worth searching for previous research and materials.
• A Heuristic evaluation is a good way to flag usability problems within the current journey that the users may have as they use the product.
• In the ideation process, it is always good to remind everyone to stay on topic and to have in mind the main goal to prevent team members from veering off course, because ideas can cross between solutions.
• Every project has constraints (technical or budget limitations, for example), and that could easily become a frustration. However, it’s valid to see them as a helpful starting point that can bring focus and understanding of the design process. So, it’s very important to give space to ideas that may come up, to define what’s possible or what it’s not, and to ask “what if?”.