Plunge: Onboarding

A major UX & UI overhaul of the Plunge onboarding journey - giving users a better experience from account creation through to adding and configuring their products.

Role:
Lead Designer

Platforms:
iOS, Android

Areas:
Strategy, UX/UI, Design, Video

Background

The onboarding experience is the very first thing users interact with when opening up an app for the first time. It plays a crucial role in helping new users understand how to use it quickly and easily. A good onboarding experience should guide users through key features and make them feel comfortable and confident in the product from the start.

Since taking over as Design Lead on the Plunge app back in April 2023, one of the highest priorities on our road map was improving this journey - as what we inherited offered a poor experience from both a UX and UI perspective.

A major issue was that it felt disconnected. The app offered a few screens for a user to create an account, before being thrown into the app without any real guide or helping hand. It was then up to the user to figure out the rest. Another big issue was that many of the screens still used remnants of old branding, meaning there were inconsistent fonts and colours being used.

Approach

The main challenge was taking an outdated and inconsistent design, and threading through our new visual style, all while improving the UX and getting buy-in from numerous stakeholders all at once.

I started by plotting out a new UX flow, to guide users smoothly from downloading the app to setting up and configuring their first product. With sign-off from key stakeholders on the improved user experience, I then started to update the old UI, through creation of a library of individual modules and components that enabled us to work quickly and make changes on the fly.

Across the board, updates focused on guiding the user more intelligently and bringing in more visually compelling design - including video content, animated UI and illustrative walkthroughs.

Adding a Product

The product onboarding flow was also completely overhauled, with a more intuitive, guided-approach being adopted. Once a user creates an account, they are then asked if they want to add their first Plunge product.

Through rigorous user testing and much trial and error, we landed on an elegant solution that guides users through all setup areas, without locking them into completing the full process in one go.

At the end of each section, for example, ‘Adding a Product’, we present the user with a ‘Setup progress’ screen, that allows them to see how far along the journey they are, as well as jump ahead, or even back out and resume at a later date.

Product Assembly

The second step in product onboarding is to assemble your product - whether that be a Cold Plunge tub or a Sauna.

The previous version of the app presented this area with a very inconsistent visual style, using a mixture of dated illustrations, photography and icons. User feedback told us this was one of the more confusing areas of the app, and was in dire need of simplification.

A project in itself - over the course of a month, I led our design team in creating a new style for how we can present assembly instructions. Assembly instructions need to be precise above all else - so we began creating to-scale illustrations, locked into a precise isometric grid, for each and every instruction, across the entire Plunge range of products. The end result was an incredibly clear and cohesive suite of assembly instructions - that I then componantised for easy use within our Figma design system.

UI enhancements

As a way to further elevate the onboarding journey and keep users enticed, I created a suite of animated UI elements. These were created as Lottie files, so ensure they were scalable and able to be coded directly into the app environment for lossless quality.

Impact

Post-launch, the analytics team tracked how the new onboarding flow affected core metrics. The results showed a significant increase in new users, and more products being registered.