Enhance user activation by redesigning the onboarding experience for a kids' mental health app
Grow Healthy - Kids mental health development app
Enhance user activation by redesigning the onboarding experience for a kids' mental health app
Grow Healthy - Kids mental health development app
Role
End-to-end Product Designer
Responsible for
Discover current design problem space and their reasons
Explore various solutions
Test solution functionality
Evaluate success through metrics
Team
Product Designer-User Researcher (me)
Product Manager
Software Engineers
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Google Docs, Zoom, Miro
Context
Grow Healthy is a mental health app designed to track kids' mental development at key milestones, helping to diagnose potential concerns early.
Parents set up the account, while children engage with the app’s programs. During onboarding, parents add their children and other parents, and then fill in their details—an essential step for accurate diagnosis.
Opportunity
Parents encountered confusion and difficulties in the member-adding process during onboarding, leading to frequent complaints and a high drop-off rate.
Solution
A redesigned member-adding flow improved usability and effectiveness. By addressing user pain points and reducing friction, the new design decreased the onboarding drop-off rate and boosted user activation.
You will read about...
Grow Healthy is a mental health app that diagnoses early signs of potential mental health issues in kids. Parents create an account and complete the onboarding process by adding members (their child and the child's parents) and then filling in their details based on their relationship with the child. The app then offers tailored programs to assess children’s mental development at key milestones.
What was the product's key challenge?
I had a conversation with the Grow Healthy team to learn about the product's challenges and the business goals they aimed to achieve. From our conversation, I learned that parents failed to add members and finish the onboarding process successfully. Looking through the user feedback from customer support and analytics data (account creation and onboarding success rate) helped me validate the assumption.
Here's what I discovered:
The data revealed a significant drop-off during the member-adding stage of the onboarding process. The issues in the member-adding process were leading to user complaints and high abandonment rates that created a major hurdle to achieving higher activation goals. Addressing these challenges was a priority to increase activation rates.
I ran usability tests and had a follow-up conversation with parents. I observed they faced confusion and difficulties when navigating the member-adding process and learnt the root causes of their problem.
Complexities and difficulties users faced in the member-adding process
What I learnt:
1. After parents signed up for the app and added their first child, during the member-adding process, the "Complete child info" button navigated users directly to the “Fill in Information” step, leaving the add member action incomplete.
2. when parents wanted to choose the parent-child relationship type with their children, they were unable to select any of the relationship options as none of them matched.
3. The "Complete" button on the parents' card confused users about what exactly the "Complete" button means.
4. The overall add member flow felt nested and complex.
By solving problems and challenges in the member-adding process, we can reduce the drop-off rate among parents during onboarding flow and enabled them to complete the onboarding process successfully. This improvement will help remove barriers to increasing the activation rate and will contribute to the overall success of Grow Healthy's product goals.
To evaluate the success, we decided to measure the Onboarding Drop-off Rate and User Activation Rate post-launch and compare them to before-redesign rates.
Also, I chose to measure the Customer Effort Score (CES) and Task Success Rate through usability tests both before and after the redesign to evaluate the design improvements.
I began brainstorming multiple ideas for all the screens throughout the member-adding process. My focus was on simplifying the process, minimising confusion, resolving usability issues, and creating a more intuitive and inclusive experience.
To foster user trust, I included explanations on the first page to clarify the reasons for collecting sensitive personal information.
I transformed the nested, multi-step flow for adding a child and parents and defining their relationship into a single screen.
For the child card that displays the child, their parents, relationship type, and relevant actions, I explored three different ideas:
First idea - A consistent card layout for displaying all members
A card that displays all members with a consistent layout with separate actions for each member.
Second idea - Child-centered card with parents' mini-cards within it
A card with a bold title showing the child's name, clearly indicating who the card belongs to, and including each parent in mini-cards within it, with separate actions for each member.
Third idea - Child-centered card with consolidated actions into a three-dot menu
A design similar to the second option but with a different approach—consolidating all actions (edit and delete) into a three-dot menu for a cleaner interface.
In a design critics session that I ran for my team, I presented different flow options, and received feedback from various perspectives.
I decided to move forward with the third idea because:
Compared to the First: It provided better clarity by clearly indicating which child the card belongs to and showing the associated parents. It also felt more intuitive, particularly when adding multiple children.
Compared to the Second: It was simpler, with a refined design that grouped all actions into a three-dot menu, reducing visual clutter, and making the interface cleaner and easier to use.
The initial usability tests show that the design didn't account for all types of parent-child relationships. Some parents couldn't find an option that matched their situation, leading to user drop-off.
One of the challenges was to design an inclusive solution that offers a diverse range of relationships, such as biological, non-biological, same-gender, and opposite-gender parents, some of which had previously been overlooked.
After exploring various ideas, I designed a more user-friendly solution: a drop-down menu that allowed users to easily select the appropriate parent-child relationship type when adding a new parent.
An inclusive solution offering a diverse range of parent-child relationships
I evaluated the Customer Effort Score (CES) and Task Success Rate through usability tests both before and after the redesign and compared them.
The results were encouraging: the CES score improved by 18.06%, indicating a more user-friendly and streamlined member-adding process that required less effort from users. Additionally, the Task Success Rate improved by 12.4%, reflecting enhanced usability and effectiveness.
I also monitored the Onboarding Drop-off Rate and User Activation Rate post-launch, comparing them to previous rates.
The data revealed a 4.68% decrease in the drop-off rate during onboarding. This suggests that the redesign had resolved many of the pain points and confusion in the member-adding process. Also, an 11.2% increase in user activation showed that the redesigned flow was smoother and more frictionless.
Design a simple and inclusive solution for parent-child relationships
A key lesson I learned was the importance of designing for inclusive family structures while maintaining simplicity. Usability tests revealed that the initial design didn’t accommodate all types of parent-child relationships, which reinforced the need for inclusive solutions that cater to a wide range of users.
The challenge was to create a simple and intuitive solution that could handle various parent-child relationships without complicating the user experience. After exploring multiple design options that didn’t quite hit the mark, I eventually reached a design that worked well for users. By creating a single page with a drop-down menu for selecting parent-child relationships, I struck the right balance between simplicity and inclusiveness and ensured the interface remained intuitive and easy to use.